View source for Conan Doyle: His Life and Art

<div style="background:#fff;padding:20px;color:#000;line-height:1.5em;">'''The biography was contested by [[Adrian Conan Doyle]], the son of [[Arthur Conan Doyle]],  who wrote "[[The True Conan Doyle]]" (John Murray, 1945, 24 pages) to rectify Pearson's errors:'''<br />« ''During the past year, I have been distressed by the number of letters that have reached me from both acquaintances and strangers in protest against an alleged "biography" of my father by a Mr. Hesketh Pearson. As the majority of my correspondents were, naturally, under the impression that the manuscript was submitted to me before publication, I must assure them that that was not the case. In its portrayal of my father and his opinions, the book is a travesty and the personal values therein ascribed to him are, in effect, the very antithesis of everything that he represented, believed in and held dear. Therefore, I will content myself with the statement that, firstly, Mr. Pearson did not even know my father ; secondly, that his manuscript was submitted to no member of the family and, thirdly, that it is nothing more than a vehicle for a stranger's personal and quite unauthoritative opinions, and is but another example of the practice that Mr. Isaac Foot has aptly termed—" Belittling famous men and disparaging the fathers that begat us." As for the literary aspect, Sir Arthur's seventy-odd books should manage to survive the drone of Mr. Pearson's wearisomely condescending criticisms.'' » - [[Adrian Conan Doyle]] ("The True Conan Doyle", John Murray, 1945)<br />See also Adrian's [[Sherlock Holmes's Identity: Conan Doyle Himself|letter]] (28 october 1943) to [[The Times]] about this biography.</div>


[[File:conan-doyle-life-and-art-1943-methuen.jpg|thumb|250px|right|''Conan Doyle: His Life and Art'' ([[Methuen & Co.]], 1943)]]

''Conan Doyle: His Life and Art'' is a biography written by [[Hesketh Pearson]] and published by [[Methuen & Co.]] in 1943.


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== Editions ==

* ''Conan Doyle: His Life and Art'' (1943, [[Methuen & Co.]] [UK])
* ''Conan Doyle'' (1946, Guild Books [UK])
* ''Conan Doyle'' (1961, Walker & Co. [US])


<gallery mode="packed" heights="250px">
File:conan-doyle-life-and-art-1943-methuen.jpg|[[Methuen & Co.]] (1943)
File:conan-doyle-life-and-art-1946-guild-books.jpg|Guild Books (1946)
File:conan-doyle-life-and-art-1961-walker.jpg|Walker & Co. (1961)
</gallery>


== Conan Doyle: His Life and Art ==
* source: [http://archive.org/details/conandoyle00pear Internet Archive]

=== Preface ===

To James Galbraith Mitchell

MY DEAR JAMES,

You and I have disagreed about most things under the sun, and as you come from somewhere in North Britain I have been compelled to argue with you about everything under the sun. But on one point at any rate we have always agreed: the immense superiority of the Sherlock Holmes saga over all other detective fiction. And although you are quite capable of disputing it, I think ou agree with me that the Brigadier Gerard stories are he best short adventure-yarns ever written.

It is because from boyhood I have never enjoyed any tales so much as those of Holmes and Gerard that I have written this book, which is (partly) a tribute of gratitude to their creator for more happy hours than I should care to count.

Yours ever,

THE AUTHOR

BATTLE,
SUSSEX


=== 1. A British Celt ===

Conan Doyle was Irish by descent, Scottish by birth, and
English by adoption. Being of a plastic nature all three
nations helped to mold his character, which included the
chivalry and enthusiasm of the first, the pride and perseverance
of the second, the stubbornness and humor of
the third. Naturally he did not pass through life without
having his chivalry described as absurdity, his pride as
conceit, his stubbornness as stupidity. The truth will
emerge as we proceed.

His grandfather, John Doyle, left Dublin for London
in the year 1815 and soon (as "H.B.") made a reputation
as a caricaturist. A reaction against the ruthless drawings
of Gillray and Rowlandson was setting in, and John
Doyle's pleasing pencil led the fashion. "My grandfather
was a gentleman, drawing gentlemen for gentlemen,"
wrote Conan Doyle. John's policy resulted in prosperity,
and his four sons inherited his gift. The eldest, James,
wrote and illustrated in color The Chronicles of England
and misspent thirteen years in compiling The Official
Baronage of England. The second son, Henry, noted as a
judge of old paintings, became manager of the National
Gallery in Dublin. The third, Richard, illustrated The 
Newcomes, was famous as a contributor to Punch, and 
designed the cover of that periodical. We are primarily 
concerned with the youngest son, Charles, a civil servant, 
who spent his spare time painting. His whimsical 
moments brought forth fairies, but in darker moods his 
imagination grappled with "wild and fearsome subjects," 
which displayed power, morbidity and humor in about 
equal proportions. At the age of nineteen Charles got a 
job in the Government Office of Works at Edinburgh, 
where, in 1855, he married Mary Foley, also of Irish 
parentage, who traced her descent, via the families of 
Pack and Percy, from the Plantagenets. They were living 
in a small flat at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, when their 
son, Arthur Conan Doyle, was born on May 22nd, 1859.

At first Charles and Mary could get along comfortably 
enough on his £240 a year. But when the family was 
increased by three girls and a boy life became difficult. 
Charles was not helpful. Though he sometimes managed, 
by the sale of a few pictures, to add another £50 to his  
income, he suffered from what is euphemistically termed 
the artistic temperament: that is, he took very little 
interest in his job and not much interest in his home; he 
lived in the clouds; and when his son writes that "even 
his faults were in some ways the result of his developed 
spirituality," it is permissible to guess that the many 
paintings he gave away were exchanged for the sort of 
hospitality that engenders benevolence. He was, his son 
tells us, "a tall man, long-bearded, and elegant; he had a 
charm of manner and a courtesy of bearing which I have 
seldom seen equalled. His wit was quick and playful. He 
possessed, also, a remarkable delicacy of mind which 
would give him moral courage enough to rise and leave 
any company which talked in a manner which was 
coarse... He was unworldly and unpractical and his 
family suffered for it."

Fortunately for their children his wife's temperament 
as not artistic. Though Irish and Catholic, like her husband, 
the climate of Scotland seems to have hardened her 
nto one of those remarkable women, unremarked in 
North Britain, who feed, clothe, and educate a family on 
an income that the neediest government would not 
trouble to tax. She was also, like many Celts, proud of 
her lineage, a pride which was inherited by her first son; but

They that on glorious ancestors enlarge<br />
Produce their debt instead of their discharge,

and Arthur discharged the debt to his with interest.

His childhood was Spartan, but he was sturdy. When 
even years old he went to school and for two years 
endured laceration from a schoolmaster whose resemblance
to a Dickensian character did not atone for the 
pain he inflicted. Arthur was, if anything, toughened by 
the treatment, and during out-of-school hours he engaged 
in many fights with his contemporaries. A love of battle 
as in his blood, and not even the experience of being 
knocked senseless by a heavy boot concealed in a bag, 
with which a bookmaker's assistant tried to brain him, 
lessened his desire to put up his fists on the least provocation,
especially in defense of those who were being 
bullied by stronger boys than themselves.

Along with his warlike tendencies went a keen taste 
or reading, and it was rumored that "a special meeting 
of a library committee was held in my honor, at which 
a bylaw was passed that no subscriber should be permitted 
to change his book more than three times a day." 
He loved Mayne Reid, whose Scalp Hunters he read 
again and again. In after years he recalled how he had 
reveled in those tales of adventure: "I do not think that 
life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as 
that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare
time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a 
corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all 
his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is! Your very 
heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans 
with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. 
You carry the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which 
such egregious things are done, and you lie out upon the 
topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into 
the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, 
and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up 
with his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. 
What a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and 
mind! Long ere I came to my teens I had traversed every 
sea, and knew the Rockies like my own back garden. 
How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging 
buffalo and so escaped him. It was an everyday 
emergency to have to set the prairie on fire in front of me in 
order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile 
down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. 
I had creased horses, I had shot down rapids, I had 
strapped on my moccasins hind-foremost to conceal my 
tracks, I had lain under water with a reed in my mouth, 
and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to 
the Indian braves whom I slew in single combats, I could 
have stocked a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, 
though I was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, 
no real harm ever came of it, and I was always nursed 
back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. It 
was all more real than the reality. Since those days I have 
in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but 
the performance was flat compared to the first time that 
I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at 
my elbow."

He displayed an early taste for verse by learning 
Macaulay's "Lay of Horatius" by heart, and such was its 
effect on his mind that he could reel it off almost verbatim
when past fifty. Once he came into close touch 
with literature, but as he cannot have been more than four 
at the time he was unaffected by the contact. A chubby-looking, white-haired giant of a man called to see his 
father, and for several minutes the future creator of Sherlock 
Holmes sat poised on the knee of the famous author 
of Vanity Fair, who whiled away the time by making 
his gold repeater watch strike a hundred o'clock for the 
youngster's entertainment. Not content with reading, the 
boy began to write, and there is a suggestion of the later 
romanticist in the theme of his first attempt: "I was six 
at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the 
achievement. It was written, I remember, upon foolscap 
paper, in what might be called a fine bold hand — four 
words to the line — and was illustrated by marginal 
pen-and-ink sketches by the author. There was a man in it, 
and there was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it 
didn't matter much, for they became blended into one 
about the time when the tiger met the man. I was a realist 
in the age of the Romanticists. I described at some length, 
both verbally and pictorially, the untimely end of that 
wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found 
myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to 
go on. 'It is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very 
hard to get them out again,' I remarked, and I have often 
had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism of my childhood. On this occasion the situation was beyond me, 
and my book, like any man, was engulfed in my tiger."

At the age of nine he went to Hodder, preparatory 
school for Stonyhurst, where Roman Catholic boys imbibe as much truth as is thought good for them. On his 
journey to Preston, in Lancashire, he was overcome with 
homesickness and wept copiously. At Preston he joined 
a crowd of other boys and was driven the remaining 
twelve miles under the guardianship of a black-robed 
Jesuit. Except for the summer holidays of six weeks he
remained for two years at Hodder, where he was fairly 
happy, his principal being "more human than Jesuits 
usually are." The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War 
during his incarceration at Hodder gave him an imaginative escape from the thralldom of lessons. Passing on to 
Stonyhurst he began to suffer in the cause of education. 
He wasted countless hours on Latin and Greek, which 
left him with a hatred of Greek only equaled by his 
loathing of Latin. He slaved away at Euclid and algebra, 
and finished up with an abhorrence of Euclid only 
equaled by his detestation of algebra. At the end of his 
life he wrote: "I can say with truth that my Latin and 
Greek... have been little use to me in life, and that my  
mathematics have been no use at all. On the other hand, 
some things which I picked up almost by accident, the 
art of reading aloud, learned when my mother was knit- 
ting, or the reading of French books, learned by spelling 
out the captions of the Jules Verne illustrations, have 
been of the greatest possible service." The bodily nourishment provided by the Jesuits was as uninteresting as 
the mental, their principle being that dry knowledge 
could only be absorbed with dry food. Breakfast consisted of bread and a mixture of hot water and milk. 
Butcher's meat for dinner, fish on Fridays, with pudding 
twice a week. For tea, a piece of bread and something 
called "beer" but only resembling it in appearance. Supper brought a repetition of well-diluted milk, bread, butter, and quite often a sybaritic indulgence in potatoes. 
Perhaps the Jesuits felt that the effects of this diet might 
lead to disorder in the dormitories, which were always 
patrolled by a master at nighttime. In fact the boys were 
never left to themselves for a moment, the priests taking 
part in their games, their walks, and their talks.

Even so the rigorous demands of religion were unsatisfied, and when good behavior could not be secured by 
over-exercising the brain and under-exercising the belly,
sterner measures were applied. The instrument of correction, Doyle had cause to remember, "was a piece of 
india-rubber of the size and shape of a thick boot sole... 
One blow of this instrument, delivered with intent, would 
cause the palm of the hand to swell up and change 
color. When I say that the usual punishment of the larger 
boys was nine on each hand, and that nine on one hand 
was an absolute minimum, it will be understood that it 
was a severe ordeal, and that the sufferer could not, as a 
rule, turn the handle of the door to get out of the room 
in which he had suffered. To take twice nine upon a cold 
day was about the extremity of human endurance." 
Young Doyle was constantly subjected to this barbarous 
punishment. He doubted whether any boys of his time 
endured more of it, the reason being that he had "a nature which responded eagerly to affectionate kindness 
(which I never received), but which rebelled against 
threats and took a perverted pride in showing that it 
would not be cowed by violence. I went out of my way 
to do really mischievous and outrageous things simply 
to show that my spirit was unbroken. An appeal to my 
better nature and not to my fears would have found an 
answer at once." His frequent penances were stamped 
in the memory of a schoolfellow, now Sir Bernard 
Partridge, who writes to me: "I recall him at Stonyhurst 
College as a thick-set boy, with a quiet manner, and a 
curious furtive smile when he was visited with one of 
the school penalties, such as leaving his desk and kneeling  
in the middle of the classroom with his books. He was, 
I fancy, rather lazy in his studies, never taking a prominent place in his form: but his brain was very nimble, 
and he was constantly throwing off verses and parodies 
on college personalities and happenings — some of which 
I thought worth keeping."

Doyle did not think much of his verses, though some 
stuff he turned out as a task on the crossing of the Red


Sea by the Israelites was so far in advance of the average boy's efforts that it made him realize his literary bent. 
Among his comrades he became popular as a yarn-spinner, and this he turned to good account: "There was my 
debut as a story-teller. On a wet half-holiday I have 
been elevated on to a desk, and with an audience of little 
boys all squatting on the floor, with their chins upon 
their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the 
amusement of that little circle. I was bribed with pastry 
to continue these efforts, and I remember that I always 
stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which shows 
that I was born to be a member of the Authors' Society. 
Sometimes, too, I would stop dead in the very thrill of 
a crisis, and could only be set agoing again by apples. 
When I had got as far as 'With his left hand in her glossy 
locks, he was waving the bloodstained knife above her 
head, when —' or 'Slowly, slowly, the door turned upon 
its hinges, and with eyes which were dilated with horror 
the wicked Marquis saw —' I knew that I had my audience in my power."

One letter he wrote while at Stonyhurst was preserved 
by his mother. The date is July 1873:

"MY OWN DEAR MAMA,

"I have been to the Taylor, and I showed him your 
letter, explaining to him that you wanted something that 
would wear well, and at the same time look well. He told 
me that the blue cloth he had was meant especially for 
Coats, but that none of it would suit well as Trousers. He 
showed me a dark sort of Cloth, which he said would suit 
a blue coat better than any other Cloth he has, and would 
wear well as trousers. On his recommendation I took this 
Cloth. I think you will like it, it does not show dirt, and 
looks very well, it is a sort of black and white very dark 
Cloth. You must write and tell me beforehand if you are
going to meet me at the station. I know nothing about 
the train yet, but I will let you know when I learn. My 
Examen is finished, so I have finished all my work for the 
year, but of course it is kept profoundly secret who has 
got a prize. I trust I am among the Chosen few.

"I hope you and the bairns are making the best of your 
vacation, as I suppose you can scarcely call the time when 
I am at home vacation.

"I have never known a year pass so quickly as the last 
one, it seems not a month ago since I left you, and I can 
remember all the minutest Articles of furniture in the 
house, even to the stains on the wall. I suppose I will have 
to perform for Frank the office I have so often performed 
for Lottie and Cony, namely, that of rocking her to sleep. 
I suppose he is out of his Long Clothes now.
"We are going to have bathing during schools this 
evening, which is a nice prospect. This is the Golden 
time of one's life at Stonyhurst, the end of the year. 
Every Thursday is a holiday, and we are having Splendid 
weather.

"I will now say Good-bye and remain your Affece son

"A. C. DOYLE."

In his last year he edited the College magazine, and at 
the end of his time amazed everyone by taking honors 
in the London Matric. He left Stonyhurst at the age of 
sixteen.

Long before he had managed to convince the authorities that he was not an ideal candidate for holy orders, 
his mother had been told that his schooling would cost 
her nothing if he were dedicated to the Church. As this 
would have saved her about £50 a year, no one could 
have blamed her for closing with the offer. But she may 
have remembered how often he had said to her, "When 
you are old, Mammie, you shall have a velvet dress and 
gold glasses and sit in comfort by the fire"; or she may 
have been cooling towards the Roman faith; or, more 
probably, her conscience would not let her sell the soul
of her boy. Anyhow she refused, and her son lived to 
bless her for the act and to make her later life comfortable.

While struggling with algebra and Greek and all the 
rest of the nonsense Doyle made a discovery, the joy of 
which more than counterbalanced the anguish of his 
lessons. This discovery, though he could not realize it 
at the time, settled his future career, decided the form 
of much of his literary work, and never ceased, through 
all the years of his life, to console and sustain him. The 
learning of history, like everything else at school, was 
repellent to him; but one day he dipped into a volume of 
Macaulay's Essays, and was enthralled. A new world was 
revealed to him, a vivid fascinating world quite unlike 
the gray and monotonous business that had bored him 
so much in class, and history suddenly became a living 
thrilling subject, "an incursion into an enchanted land." 
Then there were Scott's novels, the first books he had 
ever owned. For years they had remained unread; but at 
Stonyhurst they became his companions. He read them 
by "surreptitious candle ends in the dead of night, when 
the sense of crime added a new zest to the story." He 
always thought Ivanhoe the second greatest historical 
novel in the English language. We shall come to the 
first later on.

His last year with the Jesuits was spent at Feldkirch in 
Austria. Pausing in London on the way, the first thing he 
did was to visit Westminster Abbey in order to see 
Macaulay's grave. "It was the one great object of interest which London held for me. And so it might well be, 
when I think of all I owe him." At Feldkirch "the conditions were much more humane and I met with far 
more human kindness than at Stonyhurst, with the immediate result that I ceased to be a resentful young rebel 
and became a pillar of law and order." He did not, however,
make a good impression on the first night of his 
arrival, because a master discovered him poking another 
fellow in the dormitory with a stick; and although he 
had the excuse that the boy's loud snoring prevented him 
from going to sleep, he was gravely admonished. It is 
possible, as he says, that he became more amenable to 
discipline at Feldkirch than at Stonyhurst, but a newsaper that he founded and edited had a brief career because it lived up to its motto, "Fear not, and put it in print."

On the whole he enjoyed his year in Austria. He did 
not learn much German, because the score or so of English 
and Irish boys at the school got together and were 
as insular as their own countries; but he played football 
and went tobogganing and walked among the mountains 
and had real beer to drink and joined the school band, 
in which, being a hefty youth, he had to play a big brass 
bass instrument called the bombardon, which sounded 
"like a hippopotamus doing a step dance."

Leaving in the summer of 1876, he stopped at Paris on 
his way home. His godfather and grand-uncle, Michael 
Conan, who lived in Paris and whose name he had  
acquired at the font, wished to see him. Doyle had indulged 
in a rollicking farewell supper with a few other youths 
at Strasbourg, and had exactly twopence left when he got 
to Paris. He did not fancy the prospect of driving to the 
avenue Wagram and asking his uncle to pay for the 
cab, so left his luggage at the station and tramped. It was
a sweltering August day and by the time the Arc de 
Triomphe came in sight he was exhausted. On seeing 
another pedestrian buying a penny drink from a man 
who carried a tin on his back, he halved his capital and 
did the same; and though the drink turned out to be 
liquorice and water it helped him on his way. After 
spending a few "penurious weeks" with his "dear old
volcanic" uncle, he returned home, with nothing of value 
to show for his schooling except the encouraging valediction of a Stonyhurst master, who had called him up 
on the last day of term and addressed him thus: "Doyle,  
I have known you now for seven years, and I know you 
thoroughly. I am going to say something which you will 
remember in after-life. Doyle, you will never come to 
any good."


=== 2. Some Odd Jobs ===

He returned to poverty in Edinburgh. His father was 
still painting, still in the clouds, still producing children, 
and still earning £240 a year. Another boy and another 
girl had arrived while Arthur had been laboriously wasting his time, and one more girl was on the way. Though 
his eldest sister was sending home her salary as a governess from Portugal, and two other sisters were shortly 
to follow suit, the domestic prospect was bleak, and the 
question arose: what was to be done with Arthur? A 
lesser woman might have insisted that he should begin to 
earn money at once, and Arthur's physique would have 
suggested a steady salary in the coal-heaving or furniture-removing line, but his mother was ambitious and 
took a longer view. Edinburgh having such a high reputation for medical learning, it was decided that he should 
be a doctor and take his degree at the University; and 
as examinations for several scholarships were to be held 
a month or so after his arrival, he swotted away at his 
classics, entered for one of them, and soon heard that he 
had gained the Grierson bursary, which meant £40 for 
two years. It seemed that Greek and Latin were about to
justify the time he had spent on them, and jubilation 
reigned in the Doyle household, but on applying for the 
money he was told that there had been a clerical error, 
the Grierson bursary being open only to arts students. 
He naturally assumed that he would be granted the next-best possible prize for medical students, but was informed 
that "the candidate to whom it was allotted has already 
drawn the money." This placed him in a tricky position. 
He had a good case, but did not think it would forward 
his career if he began it by taking legal proceedings 
against his University; so he suppressed his rage and resentment and tried to assuage his disappointment by 
accepting a solatium of £7.

Entering the University in October 1876, he commenced the "long weary grind at botany, chemistry, 
anatomy, physiology, and a whole list of compulsory 
subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing 
upon the art of curing." We need not follow him on 
his dreary course, which, however, was brightened by 
books that had nothing whatever to do with the tedious 
themes of his professional study, for the medical tomes 
on his shelves were not nearly so well thumbed as 
Thackeray's Esmond, Meredith's Richard Feverel, and 
Washington Irving's Conquest of Granada. He gradually 
collected a small library of his own, each volume of 
which stood for a sacrificed lunch. Every day, on the 
way to his classes, he gazed into one of those fascinating 
second-hand bookshops which no one with literary leanings can pass without a pause or a pang. Outside the 
door was a large tub crammed with tattered volumes 
at threepence apiece. Now threepence was the precise 
sum that Doyle was able to spend on his midday sandwich and glass of beer, so he had to choose between 
literature and lunch. Whenever he approached that tub 
a combat raged between the appetite of a youthful body 
and the hunger of a busy mind. The body won five times
out of six, but when the mind was in the ascendant he 
spent a delightful five minutes choosing his volume from 
amongst a litter of almanacs, textbooks, and works of 
Scottish theology. In this way he picked up Gordon's 
translation of Tacitus, Pope's translation of Homer, 
Addison's works, Clarendon's History, Swift's Tale of 
a Tub, Gil Blas, Temple's essays, the poems of Churchill 
and Buckingham, and other stores for mental dissipation.

He made a new acquaintance in his student days: 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Autocrat, Poet, and Professor at the Breakfast Table captivated him. "Never 
have I so known and loved a man whom I had never 
seen. It was one of the ambitions of my lifetime to look 
ipon his face, but by the irony of Fate I arrived in his 
native city just in time to lay a wreath upon his newly 
turned grave." It was the leaven of science, especially 
medical science, which made the books so attractive to 
him, and he preferred Wendell Holmes to Charles Lamb 
because "there is a flavor of actual knowledge and of 
practical acquaintance with the problems and affairs 
of life, which is lacking in the elfin Londoner." It was 
perhaps not wholly chance that led him to name his 
most famous creation after the American essayist. The 
outstanding feature of Doyle's character was its simplicity and innocence, and he was deeply impressed, as 
only a simple man can be, by any display of knowledge, 
using that term not in its intuitive but in its instructiveo
or informatory sense. Though he was but partly conscious of the fact, it was this aspect in the novels of 
Walter Scott and Charles Reade that chiefly appealed to 
him and was to influence his own historical romances. 
His obligations to Macaulay and Edgar Allan Poe were 
of the same kind. If, he once said, he had to name the 
few books which had really influenced his own life, he 
would put Poe's stories second only to Macaulay's essays. Macaulay seemed to know everything; Poe seemed
to deal with everything; and Doyle mistook the memory 
of the first for profundity, the fancy of the second for 
imagination.

It is hardly surprising that such a man should have 
been so much impressed by the professors of Edinburgh 
University that he popularized two of them in his books 
and attributed vast intellectual powers to the dons who 
figure therein. To any but the simplest and most easily 
gulled individual the average professor is about as far 
from one's conception of a superhuman or an electric 
force as it is possible for a man to be. But if one of 
Doyle's professors is not a demi-god, then he has to be 
a demi-devil. Of the two he was to portray at length 
in several books, Doctor Bell (Sherlock Holmes) and 
Professor Rutherford (Challenger), we shall speak later. 
Here we may illustrate the point by reference to minor 
sketches of the good don and the bad don. The first is 
Professor Maracot, who appears in a story called The 
Maracot Deep, one of the last Doyle ever wrote. We are 
told that he "lives on some mental mountain-top, out 
of reach of ordinary mortals." From this state of abstraction he is suddenly called upon to play the man of action: "I tell you he took hold of that ship and everyone 
and everything in it, and bent it all to his will. The dry, 
creaking, absent-minded scholar had suddenly vanished, 
and instead there emerged a human electrical machine, 
crackling with vitality and quivering from the great 
driving force within. His eyes gleamed behind his glasses 
like flames in a lantern." In a crisis which unnerves and 
prostrates everyone else he again shows his mettle: "The 
quiet scholar has been submerged, and here was a superman, a great leader, a dominant soul who might mold 
mankind to his desires... Upon his face there was a 
look of such power as I have never seen upon human 
features yet." Our second example is the devil-don, 
Professor Moriarty, who appears in The Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes. Endowed by Nature "with a phenomenal mathematical faculty," at the age of twenty-one 
"he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem which 
has had a European vogue." Holmes calls him the cleverest rogue in Europe, the greatest schemer of all time, the 
possessor of a brain which might have made or marred 
the destiny of nations, and sums him up in this fashion: 
"He is the Napoleon of crime... a genius, a philosopher, 
an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He 
sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, 
but that web has a thousand radiations and he knows well 
every quiver of each of them." Obviously the creator 
of Moriarty, Maracot, Challenger, and Holmes was 
greatly struck by the professors at Edinburgh University.

As one would expect, Doyle quickly followed the scientific drift of the period and became an agnostic. His 
nature demanded a belief in something, and as one usually 
obtains what is essential to one's nature he eventually 
got what he wanted, but his simple and susceptible mind 
was overwhelmed by the information recently poured 
out by Darwin, Huxley and others, all of which went 
to prove that the Bible had not given a very scientific 
account of Creation, and that the orthodox conception of 
Hell was humbug. This was a great relief after the 
Jesuits, one of whom had horrified him by declaring 
that everyone outside the Church of Rome was eternally 
damned, for he was much too kindly disposed towards 
his fellow-creatures to believe in a God with a diabolical 
nature. While ceasing to be a Catholic he did not become an atheist. His trusting, ingenuous, reverent nature 
favored the idea of a beneficent power behind the universe, but under the influence of Huxley and the rest 
he reached a point where, before believing anything, he 
required proofs. "The evils of religion," he thought, 
"have all come from accepting things which cannot be
proved," and he called himself a materialist for the odd 
and artless reason that he could not believe in personal 
survival after death.

Certainly there was nothing very spiritual in his appearance. At the age of twenty-one he was over six feet 
in height, brown-haired, gray-eyed, broad, and forty-three round the chest; he weighed "over sixteen stone 
in the buff," and had the strength of a bullock. Not 
perhaps altogether aware that he was doing so, he 
described himself at this period in the first of his novels 
to survive, The Firm of Girdlestone: "The long, fine 
curves of the limbs, and the easy pose of the round, 
strong head upon the thick, muscular neck, might have 
served as a model to an Athenian sculptor. There was 
nothing in the face, however, to recall the regular beauty 
of the East. It was Anglo-Saxon to the last feature, with 
its honest breadth between the eyes and its nascent 
mustache... Shy, and yet strong; plain, and yet 
pleasing; it was the face of a type of man who has little 
to say for himself in this world, and says that little badly, 
but who has done more than all the talkers and the 
writers to ring this planet round with a crimson girdle 
of British possessions." Naturally a man of this sort was 
a sportsman, and Doyle never missed an opportunity to 
box with anyone who cared to take him on, and at one 
time played as a forward in the University Rugby team. 
He must have studied a lot in his spare time, but one has 
the impression that he instantly dropped his medical 
books if there was the least chance of a bout with the 
gloves. "I had an eager nature which missed nothing in 
the way of fun which could be gathered, and I had a 
great capacity for enjoyment. I read much. I played 
games all I could. I danced, and I sampled the drama 
whenever I had a sixpence to carry me to the gallery." 
He became a great admirer of Henry Irving, whom he 
saw frequently in Hamlet, The Lyons Mail and other
plays. But playgoing in those days was not unattended 
with danger, and once his strength and manliness were 
called upon. A dense crowd was waiting at the gallery 
door and a soldier made a girl scream by jamming her 
against the wall. Doyle remonstrated with him and was 
rewarded by a dig in the ribs. The soldier was about to 
follow this up when Doyle hit him clean in the face 
with both hands. The soldier drove him into an angle 
of the door and tried to kick him, but Doyle gripped 
him tightly. The situation was becoming unpleasant 
because the soldier's friends were showing hostility, one 
of them striking at Doyle's head with a cane and cracking his hat; but relief came with the opening of the door, 
through which Doyle flung his man; and then, feeling 
that his reception inside would be inhospitable, he saved 
his sixpence for another night and went home.

Meanwhile, those sixpences had to be earned, and he 
did his best to help the family as well by getting work as 
a medical assistant. For this purpose he compressed a 
year's classes into six months and advertised his services 
as a doctor's assistant for the time so saved. Knowing 
very little, and wishing to gain experience, he started by 
offering himself for nothing; but the first doctor who 
took him on valued his assistance at less than nothing, 
and after three weeks spent among the poorer classes of 
Sheffield in 1878 he left for London, where he stayed 
with some Doyle relations in Clifton Gardens, Maida 
Vale. He mooned about the metropolis for several weeks 
with empty pockets, often visiting the dock district 
where he watched the shipping and talked with the 
sailors who had roamed the world. He longed for adventure, and if it had not been for the thought of all 
that his mother had done for him he would have obliged 
the Trafalgar Square recruiting sergeants who liked the 
look of him, taken the Queen's shilling and joined the 
Army. For that matter he did "volunteer as a dresser for
the English ambulances sent to Turkey for the Russian 
war" late in '78, but the Turks did not hold out long 
enough for him to dress them. He felt humiliated by 
the lack of pence in his pocket. "It affects me in so many 
petty ways," he complained. "A poor man may do me 
a kindness, and I have to seem mean in his eyes. I may 
want a flower for a girl, and must be content to appear 
ungallant. I don't know why I should be ashamed of this, 
since it is no fault of mine, and I hope that I don't show 
it to anyone else that I am ashamed of it; but I don't 
mind confessing that it hurts my self-respect terribly." 
He was passing through that awkward phase common to 
so many young men whose bodily growth has outrun 
their spiritual development: "The shrinking, horrible 
shyness, alternating with occasional absurd fits of audacity which represent the reaction against it, the longing  
for close friendship, the agonies over imaginary slights,  
the extraordinary sexual doubts, the deadly fears caused 
by non-existent diseases, the vague emotion produced 
by all women, and the half-frightened thrill by particular ones, the aggressiveness caused by fear of being afraid, the sudden blacknesses, the profound self-distrust."

His next job was in a small Shropshire place called 
Ruyton-of-the-eleven-towns, where he stayed for four 
months, had little to do, and spent most of his time 
reading. It was here that his professional ability was 
first put to the test. During some festivities in a large  
country-house an old cannon burst and a bystander received a portion of it in his head. The doctor being out 
when the semi-demented messenger arrived, Doyle 
rushed to the scene, concealed his alarm at the sight, 
extracted the iron from the man's head, and was greatly 
relieved to find that the brain had not been injured, as 
he could see the clean white bone of the skull. "I then 
pulled the gash together, staunched the bleeding, and
finally bound it up, so that when the doctor did at last 
arrive he had little to add. This incident gave me confidence, and, what is more important still, gave others confidence."

After that he got what he called "a real money-making 
proposition." Hard work, long hours, endless prescriptions to make up for the poorest classes of Aston, Birmingham; but he earned some £2 a month. "On the whole 
I made few mistakes, though I have been known to send 
out ointment and pill boxes with elaborate directions on 
the lid and nothing inside." The doctor and his wife 
liked their assistant, treated him as a son, and he returned 
to them on two later occasions, seeing a lot of low life, 
doing all the dispensing, and eventually taking on midwifery and the more serious cases in general practice.
While at Birmingham he began to write stories. The 
urge to do so was strong within him, and when a friend, 
struck by the vividness of his letters, advised him to try 
his hand at it, he knocked off an adventure yarn called 
The Mystery of the Sassassa Valley, sent it to Chambers' 
journal, and to his amazement received £3 3s. He tried 
again for the same magazine, but though his next few 
attempts were not successful, he did not lose heart. "I 
had done it once and I cheered myself by the thought 
that I could do it again." London Society published his 
second story, The American's Tale, in '79. The small 
check was welcome, but it did not occur to him that 
he could ever be a success as a writer, and he never 
dreamed that he could himself "produce decent prose."

The financial situation at home, however, was not improving, and it looked as if prose of some sort had to 
be produced until he was authorized to prescribe pills. 
His father had subsided into a convalescent home, where 
he survived until 1893, and at the age of twenty Doyle 
found himself the head of a large and poverty-ridden 
family. Three of his sisters were sending home as much
of their salaries as they could spare, and he was doing his 
best to provide for his own maintenance, but more was 
wanted to keep the home together, and it was early in 
1880 that chance put something helpful in his way. One 
afternoon, while cramming for "one of those examinations which blight the life of medical student," an acquaintance named Currie walked into his room at Edinburgh and asked if he would care to go as a surgeon on a 
whaler at £2 10s. a month plus 3s. a ton oil money. 
Currie himself had got the job but found at the last moment that he could not fill it and wanted someone to 
take his place. Doyle did not hesitate, took over Currie's 
kit, was at Peterhead within a fortnight, and sailed in the 
Hope, a 200-ton whaler, on February 28th. He did very 
little surgery during the trip, which lasted seven months, 
and his chief occupations were to keep the captain company and supply him with cut tobacco. It was a free-and-easy life, for when the cook spoiled the dinner three 
times in succession by dosing himself too generously 
with rum, his habit was cured by one of the crew, who 
hit him so hard with a brass saucepan that his head appeared through the bottom and his neck was decorated 
by the sides of the pan like a ruff. Doyle's prowess 
as a boxer was useful and made him popular. On the first 
evening of the voyage he had several rounds with the 
steward, Jack Lamb, whose opinion was later delivered 
to the chief mate, Colin McLean: "Doyle's the best 
sur-r-r-geon we've had, Colin — he's blacked my ee." He 
did more for Lamb than that, for when the steward 
criticized the mate on his method of attacking a whale 
which had got away, both of them under the influence 
of rum, Doyle prevented bloodshed. Drink made the 
mate violent, the steward argumentative, and each time 
Jack referred to the whale's escape he was assaulted 
by Colin. After every bout Doyle tried to change the 
conversation, but the moment he had got his breath
the steward began again: "No offense, Colin, but all I 
says is that if you had been a bit quicker on the fush..."
He never got further, the word "fush" being the
mate's cue for seizing him by the throat, and Doyle's 
cue for seizing the mate round the waist, after which 
they struggled until they fell apart from sheer exhaustion. 
The steward had a pleasing tenor voice and while cleaning the knives and dishes in his pantry used to sing sentimental ditties about women which filled Doyle "with a 
vague sweet discontent." Jack's later life ran in more 
tranquil channels: he became private baker to Queen 
Victoria and sometimes wrote letters to Doyle beginning 
"My dear old Friend."

Seal-killing began early in April, and Doyle did not 
like this part of the business. "It is brutal work, though 
not more brutal than that which goes on to supply every 
dinner-table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the icefields, under 
the peaceful silence of a blue Arctic sky, did seem a 
horrible intrusion." A strong sea-swell dashed the lumps 
of floating ice together, and Doyle, inexperienced at the 
game, was ordered by the captain to remain on board. 
In a furious temper he sat on the top of the bulwarks 
dangling his legs over the side, until the swell pitched 
the boat over to an acute angle and he shot overboard, 
disappearing between two blocks of ice. Coming to the 
surface he managed to scramble on board; whereupon 
the captain said that as he could not help falling into 
the sea he might "just as well be on the ice as on the 
ship." Doyle fell in twice again that day, which amused 
the captain so much that it more than made up for a 
bad day's sealing. On a later occasion Doyle's facility 
in falling off ice nearly ended in disaster. While skinning 
a seal he stepped backwards into the water, and as he 
was some distance from the others no one noticed the 
accident. "The face of the ice was so even that I had
no purchase by which to pull myself up, and my body 
was rapidly becoming numb in the freezing water. At 
last, however, I caught hold of the hind flipper of the 
dead seal, and there was a kind of nightmare tug-of-war, 
the question being whether I should pull the seal off or 
pull myself on. At last, however, I got my knee over 
the edge and rolled on to it. I remember that my clothes 
were as hard as a suit of armour by the time I reached 
the ship, and that I had to thaw my crackling garments 
before I could change them."

In June they went farther north after whales, only 
obtaining four in three months, but Doyle showed such 
aptitude for the work that the captain offered him 
double pay, as harpooner and surgeon, if he would take 
a second voyage in the Hope. He relished the danger, 
and the lure of the Arctic with its "peculiar other-world 
feeling" was upon him, but he had to refuse. The experience haunted him all his life, and he was never to 
forget the dazzling glare of the ice, the deep blue of the 
sea, the bright blue of the sky, the crisp exhilarating air, 
the perpetual daylight which made memorable the first 
glimpse of a star when they were back in the south, the 
sense of loneliness, the call of innumerable sea-birds, the  
half-human cries of the seals, the spectacle of a seal-pack  
scattered over the ice like grains of pepper as far as the 
eye could see, the lumbering bears, the glistening lead-colored body of a whale as it jumped clear of the 
water, the thrilling moment when he saw suspended 
over him the huge side-flapper of a whale, one flick 
of which would have sent their boat to the bottom, the 
romance of standing on the brink of the unknown, and 
the first sight after six months of a woman at a light-house off the north of Scotland, even though she was 
well over fifty and wore short skirts and seaboots. He 
returned in a state of bursting good health, with fifty 
golden sovereigns concealed in the various pockets of
his clothes, so that his mother "might have the excitement of hunting for them."

During the last year of his study at Edinburgh he 
made the acquaintance of a fellow whose influence on 
his literary career was far greater than he ever knew. 
The student's name was George Budd. He belonged to 
the athletic set in the University, played on the Rugby 
team, and was one of the fastest and most determined 
forwards of his time, though the savage fury of his game 
prevented him from receiving the international cap. 
Five feet nine inches in height, with broad shoulders, an  
arching chest, and a quick jerky way of walking, he 
had a well-built body and a strikingly ugly face. His 
hair, yellowish and wiry, shot up from a square head and 
protruded from his upper lip. A bull-dog jaw, overhanging brows, small, deep-set, light-blue bloodshot eyes, 
set close together and either radiating geniality or darting forth gleams of diabolical hatred, a red, aggressive 
nose, strong yellow overlapping teeth, a throat of the 
color and texture of a fir-tree's bark and usually unprotected by collar or necktie, a voice and a laugh like 
the bellow of a bull — such were his physical characteristics. The mental Budd was as peculiar. He was half-genius, half-maniac, with a streak of charlatanism in his  
genius, and some sense in his mania. Though he never 
appeared to work, he won the anatomy prize from all 
the fellows who could not be torn from their books. At 
a moment's notice he would take up any subject with 
intense enthusiasm, weave the most amazing theories 
around it, display a mind teeming with original inventions, carry his listeners away with him until they were 
gasping with excitement, drop the subject suddenly, take 
up another, and repeat the process. Torpedoes were once 
mentioned. Torpedoes? Out came his pencil and he instantly began to rough out a novel method of piercing 
a ship's netting. The whole of the man was absorbed
in the new idea; his enthusiasm was infectious; practical  
objections were swept away by his ingenuity; he had an 
answer for everything; and as he disposed of each difficulty he roared with triumph. The subject exhausted, 
he turned to another. How had the Egyptian workmen 
got the stones to the tops of the pyramids? Easy. He 
explained how, and it seemed as if he had spent his life 
studying the question. He was full of schemes for making 
money, and he amassed imaginary fortunes on each and 
all of the inventions which poured from his fertile brain. 
As he jerked his way up and down the room he explained the new contrivance, which was going to revolutionize something or other, took out patents for it, 
included Doyle in the partnership, foretold its adoption 
throughout the civilized globe, foresaw every conceivable application of it, estimated the royalties they would 
make on it, planned out a dozen astonishing ways of 
investing the money, and pictured their retirement with 
fortunes beyond the dreams of millionaires; at the conclusion of which Doyle, who had been sailing through the air on a magic carpet, found himself trudging home with nothing in his pocket and a copy of Kirk's Physiology under his arm.

There was something both heroic and murderous 
about Budd, whose fun could change to fury at a moment's notice. He enjoyed horse-play, but no one played 
horse with him twice, because it always began in good 
humor and sometimes ended in the hospital. When in 
the mood he supported authority; when in another mood 
he flouted it. A leading London specialist was addressing  
the students, one of whom in the front row kept interjecting facetious comments. The specialist appealed for 
silence and Budd shouted, "Hold your tongue — you, sir, 
on the front bench." The student ironically suggested that 
Budd should make him hold his tongue. Nothing loath, 
Budd picked his way among the inkpots along the tops
of the desks and dropped to the floor close to the facetious student, who promptly hit him full in the face. 
Budd seized him by the throat, rushed him backwards 
out of the classroom, and "there was a noise like the 
delivery of a ton of coals." Budd returned with a black 
eye and received three cheers from three hundred 
spectators. Against this praiseworthy performance must 
be recorded one that displays another side of his nature.  
He did not drink much, but a little alcohol had an immediate effect on him: he might want to fight everyone 
he met, or collect a crowd and preach to it, or play the 
fool in public. One quaint result was that, while he could 
walk or run without deviating a step from his direction, 
sooner or later he would unconsciously twist about and 
return the way he had gone. Apparently sober, but 
really drunk, he visited the station one night and courteously inquired of the ticket-clerk the distance to 
London. The clerk advanced his face to the hole in the 
glass in order to reply, and received Budd's fist slap on  
his nose. His yell brought the police, and Budd sprinted 
down Princes Street with some of the railway staff 
and constabulary in hot pursuit. But he soon out-distanced them, and after a while they paused to take 
breath and hold council. Suddenly they were amazed to 
see their quarry returning towards them and going as 
fast as ever, he of course being "under the influence" 
and unaware that he had changed direction. They 
tripped him up, fell upon him, and after a violent 
struggle got him to the police station. Next morning 
he was brought before the magistrate and defended 
himself from the dock with such brilliance that he was 
let off with a nominal fine; after which he invited the 
police and everyone else who had witnessed against him 
to the nearest pub and entertained them with reminiscences and whisky.

His relations with women were of an equally incalculable order. Once he had to choose between compromising a woman or damaging himself. Without hesitating 
a second he chose the latter and hurled himself out of 
a third-floor window; but he was in luck, a laurel bush 
breaking his fall and the ground being soft. His marriage 
was just as precipitate. He fell in love with a girl who 
was under age, locked her governess in a room, dis- 
guised himself by dyeing his hair black, and decamped 
with the girl. Having consulted a Bradshaw, and selected 
the most out-of-the-way place they could find, they 
spent their honeymoon in the village inn, where their 
sudden appearance and the weird yellow-and-black 
effect of his hair, the dye having failed to take in certain 
places, must have formed a topic of conversation among 
the natives for several years and made them far more 
conspicuous than they would have been in Piccadilly 
Circus. "From this time forward," wrote Doyle, "there 
was added to his other peculiarities the fact that when 
the sunlight struck upon his hair at certain angles, it 
turned it all iridescent and shimmering." They came to 
Edinburgh after the long vacation, took four small 
rooms over a grocer's shop, and furnished them sparsely. 
Budd met Doyle in the street shortly after this, thumped 
him heartily on the back, bellowed the details of the 
events just described, and carried him off to meet the 
lady. Doyle found a small, timid, gentle, sweet-faced, 
quiet-voiced girl, very likeable but utterly under the 
dominion of her husband, whom she obviously adored. 
Their flat consisted of a kitchen, a sitting-room, a bed- 
room, and a fourth room which Budd, convinced that 
it was a center of disease, had not only locked up but 
had gummed paper over the door-cracks to prevent in- 
fection; though Doyle was equally convinced that the 
smell of cheeses from the grocer's shop below had put 
the idea into his friend's head.

Doyle became a frequent visitor; in fact he was almost
the only visitor. There were never more than two chairs 
in the sitting-room, but he would sit on a pile of 
volumes of the British Medical Journal, dining off an 
apple dumpling, and listening to Budd as he strode about 
the room, shouting, gesticulating, talking. "What did we 
care, any one of the three of us, where we sat or how 
we lived, when youth throbbed hot in our veins, and 
our souls were all aflame with the possibilities of life? I  
still look upon those Bohemian evenings, in the bare 
room amid the smell of cheese, as being among the happiest that I have known." Doyle's simple, candid, modest 
disposition, his solidity and shrewd common sense, had 
a steadying effect on Budd, and when Dr. Watson 
explains his particular value to Sherlock Holmes we are 
reading Doyle's subconscious recollection of another 
quality in him that attracted Budd: "I was a whetstone 
for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in 
my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be 
made to me — many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead — but none the less, 
having formed the habit, it had become in some way 
helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated 
him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, 
that irritation served only to make his own flame-like 
intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and 
swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance." It 
is as easy to perceive Budd's more spectacular role in the 
alliance. His mercurial and explosive temperament, his 
genius for improvisation, his quick inventive mind, his 
range and grasp of subjects, his outrageous behavior, 
his buffoonery, the drama and comedy inseparable from 
his flamboyant personality, even the sinister and malignant qualities in his character, made an irresistible appeal to what was most durable in Doyle's nature: his 
boyish love of the unexpected, of the mysterious and 
the fantastic. "His mind is so nimble and his thoughts so
extravagant, that your own break away from their usual 
grooves, and surprise you by their activity," wrote 
Doyle. "You feel pleased at your own inventiveness and 
originality, when you are really like the wren when 
it took a lift on the eagle's shoulder." Indeed, such was 
the effect of Budd's bizarre character on Doyle's impressionable and easily stimulated mind that we can 
find traces of that impact all over his work. It is Budd, 
far more than any original, who gives life to the professors in his books. Some of his experiences with Budd 
are described in his stories, many of which owe their 
inspiration to the same source. Budd is in the energy of 
Holmes, the braggadocio of Gerard, the malignity of 
Moriarty, the violence of Roylott, the fanaticism of 
Maracot, and the more extravagant incidents and individuals who appear in his pages; while in the creation of 
Challenger he is haunted by Budd, who, like the Professor, has a device for deflecting a torpedo, a new and 
economical method of separating nitrogen from the air, 
and so on. The description of Challenger's personality is 
a description of Budd's: "If it is impossible to be at 
your ease, it is equally impossible to be dull in his 
company, for one is always in a state of half-tremulous 
doubt as to what sudden turn his formidable temper 
may take." And when Challenger, in The Land of Mist, 
goes to a seance in order to expose the proceedings, the 
medium asks whether anyone present would own to a 
friend named Budworth, which is a combination of 
Budd and "Cullingworth," the pseudonym invented by 
Doyle for Budd in The Stark Munro Letters and retained by him in the story of his own life. "No," reports 
the chronicler in The Land of Mist, "no one would own 
to a friend named Budworth" — a casual comment, the 
true significance of which was lost on Doyle, who never 
recognized how much he owed as a story-teller to 
Budd. His debt will be more apparent later on.

In due time Doyle underwent the horrors of examination at the University, but in spite of his nervousness he 
noted the comedy which preceded the viva voce. A 
crowd of students were awaiting their turn to be called 
in: "It was painful to observe their attempts to appear 
confident and unconcerned as they glanced round the 
heavens, as if to observe the state of the weather, or 
examined with well-feigned archaeological fervor the 
inscriptions upon the old University walls. Most painful 
of all was it when someone, plucking up courage, would 
venture upon a tiny joke, at which the whole company 
would gibber in an ostentatious way, as though to show 
that even in this dire pass the appreciation of humor still 
remained with them. At times, when any of their number alluded to the examination or detailed the questions 
which had been propounded to Brown or Baker the day 
before, the mask of unconcern would be dropped, and 
the whole assembly would glare eagerly and silently 
at the speaker." Some Job's comforter went about suggesting abstruse questions and hinting that they represented a particular examiner's hobby. For example:

"What do you know about cacodyl?"

"Cacodyl? It's some sort of antediluvian reptile, isn't it?"

"No. It's an organic explosive chemical compound. You're sure to be asked about cacodyl."

At which point the delighted questioner left his discomfited victim.

Doyle passed his final examination "with fair but not 
notable distinction" in 1881, qualifying as Bachelor of 
Medicine in August of that year, and taking his Doctor's 
degree in 1885. He had intended to start his professional 
life as a ship's surgeon, partly because he wanted to see 
something of the world and partly to make enough 
money to set up in practice. To this end he had applied 
for a job on a passenger ship; but he had heard nothing
for months and was seriously thinking of joining the 
Army or the Navy or the Indian Service when a telegram arrived offering him the post of medical officer at 
£12 a month on the African Steam Navigation Company's Mayumba. He sailed from Liverpool on October 
22nd, 1881, and spent the four most miserable months 
of his existence going from place to place on the west 
coast of Africa. It was a neat little steamer of 4,000 
tons, carrying a cargo of mixed goods and a score or 
so of passengers. He started well by saving the lives 
of everybody on board. The ship was running before 
a fierce gale in a thick fog down the Irish Sea when, 
through a rift in the fog, Doyle suddenly spotted a 
lighthouse on the port side. Knowing that they were 
supposed to be well down on the Irish coast, but not 
wishing to lay himself open to ridicule as a landsman, 
he casually drew the mate's attention to the lighthouse 
and asked, as if for information, "Is that all right?" 
Apparently it was not all right, because the mate nearly 
jumped out of his skin and for several moments clamor 
reigned on the ship. They had been heading straight 
for the rocks. The passengers included some nice white 
women and some nasty Negro traders, who were patrons 
of the line and had to be humored. These palm oil chiefs 
were wealthy, spending their money on drink and 
women, and Doyle noted that one of them "had a choice 
selection of the demi-monde of Liverpool to see him 
off."

The first part of the journey was stormy, everyone 
was seasick, and Doyle was kept busy; but life became 
endurable further south, and he was able to enjoy 
Madeira and the Canaries. They touched at Freetown, 
Sierra Leone, where white people used to die quickly in 
beautiful surroundings, at the capital of Liberia, and so 
on down that burning, surf-lined, flat, monotonous, and 
seemingly endless coast. Trade in those days was conducted in a rough-and-ready fashion: "Once we moved 
on while a hundred native visitors were still on board. 
It was funny to see them dive off and make for their 
canoes. One of them had a tall hat, an umbrella, and a 
large colored picture of the Saviour — all of which he 
had bought at the trading booths which the men rig 
up in the forecastle. These impedimenta did not prevent 
him from swimming to his boat. At another minor port, 
since we were pressed for time, we simply threw our 
consignment of barrel staves overboard, knowing that 
sooner or later they would wash up on the beach, though 
how the real owner could make good his claim to them 
I do not know." At Lagos the ship had to do without 
her doctor, for a mosquito got at him and he was down 
with fever, which came with its usual suddenness, sent 
him reeling to his bunk, and laid him out senseless. "As 
I was myself doctor there was no one to look after me 
and I lay for several days fighting it out with Death 
in a very small ring and without a second." While he 
was engaged in the struggle another passenger succumbed; but his constitution pulled him through and 
in a week he was convalescent. At Old Calabar he got 
into a canoe with another fellow and paddled up to 
Creektown through gloomy mangrove swamps. Here 
they were in native territory, and the King, hearing of 
their presence, ordered them to report instantly to him. 
They paddled back to their steamer faster than they 
went to Creektown. Having seen the Negroes sporting 
in the waters, Doyle considered that a white man should 
be equally free of the ocean, and at Cape Coast Castle 
he plunged in and swam around the ship. While drying 
himself on deck after this excursion he observed the high 
fin of a shark, which had heard the splashing and come 
up to look for him. The sight made him feel rather cold.

One day, while standing on the poop in a raging 
thunderstorm, he decided that this first trip must be
his last. Existence on board ship was too comfortable 
for a young ambitious man. One more voyage and he 
would probably want to settle into the easy enervating 
rut of ship's surgeon for life. If he desired success as a 
doctor, there was a hard struggle ahead of him, and 
whereas one wander-year might be useful two would be 
fatal. So he thought; and with his determination to stop 
traveling the seas he made up his mind to stop drinking 
spirits for the rest of the voyage. The deadliness of 
Africa no less than the luxury of the boat palled on him,  
and he wrote a verse in his diary:

Oh Africa, where are thy charms<br />
That sages have seen in thy face?<br />
Better dwell in Old England on alms<br />
Than be rich in that terrible place.

The return journey, spent in collecting oil and ivory 
from the places where they had dropped beads and 
umbrellas on the outward voyage, was enlivened during 
its last week by the ship catching fire. For the first two 
or three days they did not take it seriously, but when 
the smoke turned into a blaze they did. All hands 
exerted themselves for over twelve hours, the iron side 
of the ship getting hotter every hour until at one point 
it was red-hot and arrangements were being made to 
leave in the boats, but by the evening the danger was 
over and the "pillars of smoke were down to mere 
wisps." They reached Liverpool on January 14th, 1882.

The atmosphere of the west coast of Africa, to say 
nothing of the atmosphere of the Mayumba, had been 
unfavorable to literary conversation, and Doyle did not 
feel that he had made any mental or spiritual advance 
during the trip; but the American consul at Monrovia, 
a Negro, had discussed Motley with him and had told 
him that if he wished to travel in Africa he should 
go unarmed: "You would not like it in England if a
body of men came armed to the teeth and marched 
through your land. The Africans are quite as sensitive." 
Also a young Frenchman, dying of fever, had given him 
Flammarion's L'Atinosphere as a professional fee. Apart  
from these two incidents Doyle was thrown back on his 
old companions for mental nourishment, and on one of 
them in particular. Glancing over his library a quarter  
of a century later, he told us which it was: "If I had 
to choose the one book out of all that line from which 
I have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point 
to yonder stained copy of Macaulay's Essays. It seems 
entwined into my whole life as I look backwards. It was  
my comrade in my student days, it has been with me on 
the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my 
humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest 
Scotch harpooners have addled their brains over it, and  
you may still see the grease stains where the second 
engineer grappled with Frederick the Great."


=== 3. Doctor Budd ===

After finishing at the University Budd had disappeared 
from Edinburgh, and as he never wrote letters Doyle 
had lost touch with him for some months. But one 
spring day in 1881 a wire arrived from Bristol: "Come 
at once. I have urgent need of you. Budd." He then 
remembered that Budd's father had been a leading Bristol 
physician and presumed that his friend was carrying on 
the family business. He was working in Birmingham 
at the time, but set off at once for Bristol, feeling sure 
that Budd had something good to offer him. The first 
person he saw on the station platform was Budd, with 
his hat as usual on the back of his head, an unbuttoned 
waistcoat, and the unusual addition of a collar round his  
neck. He greeted Doyle with a roar, pulled him out of 
the carriage, seized his carpet bag, and hustled him along 
the streets, talking about everything except the reason 
for his telegram. From football he jumped to his latest 
invention, concerning which he got so excited that he 
surrendered the bag to Doyle in order to gesticulate 
freely and discoursed in this manner:

"My dear Doyle, why was armor abandoned, eh?
What! I'll tell you why. It was because the weight of 
metal that would protect a man who was standing up 
was more than he could carry. But battles are not fought 
nowadays by men who are standing up. Your infantry 
are all lying on their stomachs, and it would take very 
little to protect them. And steel has improved, Doyle! 
Chilled steel! Bessemer! Bessemer! Very good. How 
much to cover a man? Fourteen inches by twelve, meeting at an angle so that the bullet will glance. A notch 
at one side for the rifle. There you have it, laddie — the 
Budd patent portable bullet-proof shield! Weight? Oh, 
the weight would be sixteen pounds. I worked it out. 
Each company carries its shields in go-carts, and they 
are served out on going into action. Give me twenty 
thousand good shots, and I'll go in at Calais and come out 
at Pekin. Think of it, my boy! — the moral effect. One 
side gets home every time and the other plasters its 
bullets up against steel plates. No troops would stand it. 
The nation that gets it first will pitchfork the rest of 
Europe over the edge. They're bound to have it — all of 
them. Let's reckon it out. There's about eight million 
of them on a war footing. Let us suppose that only half 
of them have it. I say only half, because I don't want 
to be too sanguine. That's four million, and I should take 
a royalty of four shillings on wholesale orders. What's 
that, Doyle? About three-quarters of a million sterling, 
eh? How's that, laddie, eh? what?"

This statement, which gave Doyle an idea he was later 
to develop, was delivered in a dramatic style, punctuated  
with pauses, now whispered, now bawled, and accompanied by thumps, shrugs, and peals of laughter.

They arrived at a large house, standing in its own 
grounds, and when the door was opened by a footman 
in red plush knee-breeches Doyle felt that he was on 
velvet. Mrs. Budd looked pale and tired, and their surroundings were impressively ancestral, yet they had
an uproarious supper which reminded Doyle of the 
evenings above the grocer's shop. Not a syllable was 
uttered during the meal in explanation of the "urgent 
need" that had brought him to Bristol. Afterwards they 
retired to a small sitting-room, where the men lighted 
their pipes, Mrs. Budd her cigarette, and for a while they 
smoked in silence. Suddenly Budd jumped to his feet, 
dashed at the door, flung it open, discovered no one's 
ear glued to the keyhole, shut it, and returned to his 
armchair. He had an insanely suspicious nature and was 
firmly convinced that people were conspiring against 
him and spying on him. His fears temporarily allayed, 
he confided in his visitor:

"Doyle, what I wanted to tell you is, that I am utterly, hopelessly, and irretrievably ruined."

Doyle, who was lazily tilting his chair backwards, nearly fell off it.

"Sorry to disappoint you, my boy. That's not what you expected to hear, I can see."

"Well," stammered Doyle, "it is rather a surprise, old chap. I thought from the... from the..."

"From the house, and the footman, and the furniture. 
Well, they've eaten me up among them... licked me 
clean, bones and gravy. I'm done for, my boy, unless... 
unless some friend were to lend me his name on a
bit of stamped paper."

"I can't do it, Budd. It's a wretched thing to have to refuse a friend; and if I had the money..."

"Wait till you're asked," snapped Budd, with a nasty 
gleam in his eyes. "Besides, as you have nothing and no 
prospects, what earthly use would your name on a paper 
be?"

"That's what I want to know," murmured Doyle, feeling a little mortified all the same.

"Look here, laddie; d'you see that pile of letters on the left of the table?"

"Yes."

"Those are duns. And d'you see those documents on 
the right? Well, those are County Court summonses. 
And now d'you see that?" He showed a ledger with 
three or four names on the first page. "That's the practice!" He laughed until the veins swelled on his forehead, his wife sympathetically joining in. Recovering 
himself, he proceeded: "It's this way, Doyle. You have 
probably heard — in fact I have told you myself — that my 
father had the finest practice in Bristol. As far as I 
could judge, he was a man of no capacity, but still there  
you are — he had it. Well, he's been dead seven years, and 
fifty nets dipping into his little fish-pond. However, 
when I passed I thought my best move was to come 
down to the old place and see whether I couldn't piece 
the thing together again. The name ought to be worth 
something, I thought. But it was no use doing the thing 
in a half-hearted way. Not a bit of use in that, Doyle. 
The kind of people who came to him were wealthy, and 
must see a fine house and a man in livery. What chance 
was there of gathering them into a bow-windowed 
forty-pound-a-year house with a grubby-faced maid at 
the door? What do you suppose I did? My boy, I took 
the governor's old house, that was unlet — the very 
house that he kept up at five thousand a year. Off I 
started in rare style, and sank my last cent in furniture. 
But it's no use, laddie. I can't hold on any longer. I got 
two accidents and an epileptic — twenty-two pounds, 
eight and sixpence — that's the lot!"

"What will you do, then?"

"That's what I wanted your advice about. That's 
why I wired for you. I always respected your opinion, 
my boy, and I thought that now was the time to have it."

Though the appeal flattered him, it occurred to Doyle 
that it was rather late in the day to ask his advice.

"You really think it's no use holding on here?"

"You take warning from it, Doyle. You've got to start 
yet. Take my tip, and go where no one knows you. 
People will trust a stranger quick enough; but if they can 
remember you as a little chap who ran about in knicker-bockers, and got spanked with a hair brush for stealing 
plums, they are not going to put their lives in your 
keeping. It's all very well to talk about friendships and 
family connections; but when a man has a pain in the 
stomach he doesn't care a toss about all that. I'd stick it 
up in gold letters in every medical classroom — have it 
carved across the gate of the University — that if a man 
wants friends he must go among strangers. It's all up 
here, Doyle; so there's no use in advising me to hold 
on."

Having ascertained that Budd owed £700, that the 
rent of his house was £200, that he had already raised 
money on the furniture, and that his total assets came 
to less than £10, Doyle advised him to call a meeting of 
his creditors and make a clean breast of it. "They can 
see for themselves that you are young and energetic — 
sure to succeed sooner or later. If they push you into 
a corner now, they can get nothing. Make that clear to 
them. But if you make a fresh start elsewhere and succeed, you may pay them all in full. I see no other possible way out of it."

Apparently Budd was entirely of his opinion: "I knew 
that you'd say that, and it's just what I thought myself. 
Well, then, that settles it, and I am much obliged to you 
for your advice, and that's all we'll say about the matter 
tonight. I've made my shot and missed. Next time I 
shall hit, and it won't be long either."

In a minute or two he was drinking whisky and rattling away as if there were no such things as duns and 
summonses. Unfortunately, two glasses of whisky had 
its usual effect on him, and after his wife had left them
together he brought the subject round to boxing and 
suggested a few rounds. Doyle, who ought to have 
known better, could never resist a challenge, and 
donned the gloves. They pushed back the table, put 
the lamp on a high bracket, and faced one another. 
At once Doyle realized his error. The malignant glare 
in the eyes of Budd said as plainly as words that Doyle's 
refusal to back his paper was still rankling in his mind. 
Doyle wished to do a little friendly sparring, but Budd 
rushed at him, hitting hard with both hands, knocked 
him off his legs, forced him up against the door, and 
leaving him no elbow-space began to pummel him severely. Somehow Doyle managed to evade a terrific 
right-hander that would have settled the contest, and 
broke away.

"Look here," said he, "there's not much boxing about 
this game."

"Yes, I hit pretty hard, don't I?" returned Budd complacently.

"If you come boring into me like that, I'm bound to 
hit you out again. I want to play light if you'll let me."

He had hardly said the words when Budd made another onslaught. Doyle side-stepped; but his opponent 
was round in an instant, flew at him again, knocked him 
off his balance, and gave him a crack on the ear and a 
blow on the body. Doyle tripped over a footstool, and 
before he could right himself received another on the 
ear which made his head sing.

"Say when you've had enough," said Budd, preening himself.

Doyle had had quite enough and was now prepared to 
repay some of it. This time he was ready for his antagonist, breaking his tempestuous assault with a left-hander 
on the nose and then giving him a jab on the jaw which 
floored him.

"You swine!" shrieked Budd, his face convulsed with 
maniacal rage. "Take those gloves off and put your 
hands up."

"Go on, you silly ass!" replied Doyle good-humoredly. 
"What is there to fight about?"

"By God, Doyle," yelled Budd, flinging away his own 
gloves, "if you don't take 'em off I'll go for you, whether 
they're on or off."

"Have a glass of soda water," Doyle suggested. 
"You're afraid of me," snarled Budd; "that's what's 
the matter with you."

Doyle took his gloves off, and as he did so Mrs. Budd 
walked in.

"George!" she cried, horrified when she saw the lower 
part of his face covered with blood, his nose having bled 
profusely; and then, turning to his opponent, "What is 
the meaning of this, Mr. Doyle?" Though there was a 
look of loathing in her eyes, Doyle's impulse was to pick 
her up and kiss her.

"We've only been having a little spar," he said. "Your 
husband was complaining that he never got any exercise."

"It's all right, dear," said Budd, putting on his coat. 

"Don't be a little stupid. Are the servants gone to bed? 
Well, you might bring some water in a basin from the 
kitchen. Sit down, Doyle, and light your pipe again. I 
have a hundred things that I want to talk to you about."

With his remarkable talent as a quick-change artist, 
Budd chatted away as if nothing had occurred to ruffle 
their friendship, and the evening closed in harmony.
Next morning, though their features showed the wear 
and tear of the previous night, Budd was at the top of his 
form. He had a hundred ideas for making their fortunes, 
several of which will be familiar to readers of Doyle's 
stories. The great thing, according to Budd, was to get 
one's name in the papers. Quite simple! Doyle was to 
drop senseless in the roadway outside his house; a crowd
would gather; he would be carried in; and a footman 
would run to the newspaper offices with a paragraph 
about it. Should the crowd be inconsiderate enough to 
take him to the rival practitioner on the other side of the  
road, different methods would have to be tried. Doyle 
could have a fit at Budd's very door; indeed he could 
have several fits, in various disguises, each fit to produce 
fresh copy for the press. When fits ceased to have any 
news value, Doyle could actually drop dead at a convenient spot, Budd would restore him to life, and England would ring with his fame.

While Budd was outlining these schemes for the betterment of his position, and Doyle was exploding with 
laughter, the doctor across the way was receiving a succession of patients, and every now and then the flow of 
Budd's ideas was checked while he anathematized both 
rival and patients. Whenever he caught sight of a new 
arrival on the opposite doorstep, he sprang from his chair 
and strode about the room, cursing and raving and gnashing his teeth.

"There you are!" he would suddenly yell. "See that 
man with a limp! Every morning he goes. Displaced 
semilunar cartilage, and a three months' job. The man's 
worth thirty-five shillings a week!" A few minutes later 
he would interrupt himself with a shriek: "There! I'm 
hanged if the woman with the rheumatic arthritis isn't 
around in her bath-chair again. She's all seal-skin and 
lactic acid. It's simply sickening to see how they crowd 
to that man. And such a man! You haven't seen him. All 
the better for you. What the devil are you laughing at, 
Doyle?"

Doyle was limp from laughter when he left Bristol.
A few months later he was on his way to the west 
coast of Africa. When he returned he heard indirectly 
that Budd had called his creditors together, reduced some 
of them to tears with a detailed account of his struggle
with adversity, obtained their willing consent to let their 
bills stand over sine die, received a unanimous vote of 
confidence, and very nearly persuaded them to send 
round the hat and start him off with a cash testimonial.

After he got back Doyle was wondering whether he 
dared risk the plunge into practice on his own account 
when, in the late spring of 1882, he received a wire from 
Budd: "Started here in Plymouth last June. Colossal success. My example must revolutionize medical practice. 
Rapidly making fortune. Have invention which is worth 
millions. Unless our Admiralty take it up shall make 
Brazil the leading naval power. Come down by next train 
on receiving this. Have plenty for you to do." Doyle had 
returned to Birmingham and did not feel sufficient confidence in Budd to do as he suggested. Instead he wrote 
to say that he was quite comfortable where he was and 
would not leave his present job unless he could feel sure 
of a permanency. After a silence of ten days Budd telegraphed again: "Your letter to hand. Why not call me 
a liar at once? I tell you that I have seen thirty thousand 
patients in the last year. My actual takings have been 
over four thousand pounds. All patients come to me. 
Would not cross the street to see Queen Victoria. You 
can have all visiting, all surgery, all midwifery. Make 
what you like of it. Will guarantee three hundred pounds 
the first year." After talking over the matter with the 
doctor for whom he was working, Doyle left for Plymouth.

Again Budd was on the platform to welcome him with 
a roar and a thump on the back.

"My dear chap," he began at once, "we'll clear this 
town out. I tell you, Doyle, we won't leave a doctor in 
it. It's all they can do now to get butter to their bread; 
and when we get to work together they'll have to eat it 
dry. Listen to me, my boy! There are a hundred and 
twenty thousand folk in this town, all shrieking for
advice, and there isn't a doctor who knows a rhubarb pill 
from a calculus. Man, we only have to gather them in. I 
stand and take the money until my arm aches."

"But how is it?" asked Doyle, bewildered. "Are there 
so few other doctors?"

"Few!" shouted Budd. "By Crums, the streets are 
blocked with them. You couldn't fall out of a window 
in this town without killing a doctor. But of all the — 
well, there, you'll see them for yourself. You walked to 
my house at Bristol. I don't let my friends walk to my 
house at Plymouth — eh, what?"

At this point there was an obviously prearranged bit of 
comedy. A luxurious carriage drawn by two fine-looking 
black horses awaited them, and an obsequious coachman 
asked Budd which of his houses he would like to be 
driven to. Noting with satisfaction that Doyle had been 
suitably impressed, Budd said that as dinner would be 
nearly ready they had better "drive to the town residential." In the carriage Doyle ejaculated his amazement and 
was informed that, for the time being, Budd had contented himself with a town house, a country house, and a house of business.

"Consulting and waiting room?" Doyle supposed.

"You cannot rise to a situation," said Budd. "I never 
met a man with such a stodgy imagination. I have written to you about my practice, and I've wired to you 
about it, and here you sit asking me if I work it in two 
rooms. I'll have to hire the market square before I've 
finished, and then I won't have space to wag my elbows. 
Can your imagination rise to a great house with people 
waiting in every room, jammed in as tight as they'll fit, 
and two layers of them squatting in the cellar? Well, 
that's my house of business on an average day. The folk 
come in from the county fifty miles off, and eat bread 
and treacle on the doorstep, so as to be first in when the 
housekeeper comes down. The medical officer of health
made an official complaint of the overcrowding of my 
waiting-rooms. They wait in the stables, and sit along 
the racks and under the horses' bellies. I'll turn some of 
'em on to you, my boy, and then you'll know a little 
more about it."

The carriage pulled up on the Hoe at a corner house 
which looked like a spacious hotel. Doyle later discovered that it had been a leading club, the rent of which 
had been too high for the members. An imposing sweep 
of steps led up to the door, above which five or six 
stories were capped by pinnacles and a flagstaff. The 
thirty-odd bedrooms had not been furnished, but the 
ground-floor rooms and the hall were on a spectacular 
scale. After modestly announcing that this was his "little 
place," Budd took Doyle upstairs. "You see," said he, as 
he knocked a few nails into the door of Doyle's bedroom, 
which contained a small iron bed and a basin mounted 
on a packing-case, "there's no good my putting a forty-pound suite into a bedroom, and then having to chuck it 
all out of the window in order to make room for a hundred-pound one. No sense in that, Doyle, eh, what? I'm 
going to furnish this house as no house has ever been 
furnished. By Crums, I'll bring the folk from a hundred 
miles round just to have leave to look at it. But I must 
do it room by room."

Mrs. Budd gave her visitor a cordial welcome and they 
sat down to a dinner which fulfilled the expectations 
aroused by the furniture, carpet, and curtains of the dining-room. Budd was in ecstasies about the huge prices he 
had paid, dragged Doyle about the room while the soup 
was getting cold to inspect the chairs, hangings, etc., and 
even swung the waiting-maid round by the arm to ask if 
Doyle had ever seen a neater one. Half-way through the 
meal he dashed from the room and returned with a bag 
full of cash, which he emptied on the table-cloth. "Our 
day's take," he explained. It came to £31 8s. 0d. When
Doyle remarked that his Bristol creditors would be glad 
to hear that he was doing so well, Budd's geniality vanished, his expression turned to one of fiendish ferocity,
and his wife sent the maid out of the room.

"What rot you do talk!" he cried. "Do you suppose I am going to cripple myself for years by letting those debts hang on to me?"

"I understood that you had promised," said Doyle. Still, of course, it's no business of mine."

"I should hope not. A tradesman stands to win or to ose. He allows a margin for bad debts. I would have aid it if I could. I couldn't, and so I wiped the slate clean. No one in his senses would dream of spending all hat I make in Plymouth upon the tradesmen of Bristol."

"Suppose they come down on you?"

"Well, we'll see about that when they do. Meanwhile 
am paying ready money for every mortal thing that 
comes up the doorsteps... There's nearly four hundred
pounds under this one ceiling."

There was a tap at the door and a boy in buttons entered.

"If you please, sir, Mr. Duncan wishes to see you." 

"Give my compliments to Mr. Duncan, and tell him he may go to the devil!"

"My dear George!" exclaimed his wife.

"Tell him I am at dinner; and if all the kings in Europew
were waiting in the hall I wouldn't cross that door mat 
to see them."

After a minute's absence the boy was back again. 

"Please, sir, he won't go."

"Won't go? What d'you mean, you brat? 'What are you boggling about?"

"It's his bill, sir," said the trembling boy.

"His bill, eh?" The veins on Budd's forehead began to 
well. "Look here!" He placed his watch on the table. 
It's two minutes to eight. At eight I'm coming out, and
if I find him there I'll strew the street with him. Tell him 
I'll shred him over the parish. He has two minutes to save 
his life in, and one of them is nearly gone."

A few moments later they heard the bang of the front 
door, and Budd gave himself up to mirth, sending forth 
peal upon peal of laughter. "I'll drive him mad," he said 
at last, wiping away his tears. "He's a nervous, chicken-livered kind of man, and when I look at him he turns 
the color of putty. If I pass his shop I usually just drop 
in and stand and look at him. I never speak, but just 
look. It paralyzes him." Doyle learned that the man was 
Budd's corn merchant, who had cheated him once or 
twice: hence the treatment. But Budd told his wife to 
send the man £20 on account the following day.

Dinner over, they went into a back room where Budd 
conducted his experiments. There were pistols, cartridges, a rook rifle, an electric battery, and a large 
magnet. Doyle asked what it was all for. Budd turned to 
his wife and repeated the question. "Naval supremacy 
and the command of the seas," she dutifully replied.

"That's it," he crowed. "Naval supremacy and command of the seas. It's all here, right under your nose. 
I tell you, Doyle, I could go to Switzerland tomorrow, 
and I could say to them, 'Look here, you haven't got a 
seaboard, and you haven't got a port; but just find me a 
ship and hoist your flag on it, and give you every 
ocean under heaven.' I'd sweep the seas until there wasn't 
a match-box floating on them. Or I could make them 
over to a limited company, and join the board after allotment. I hold the salt water in the cup of this hand, every 
drop of it... Oh, you may grin! You'll grin a little 
wider when you see the dividends coming in. What's 
the value of that magnet?"

"A pound."

"A million pounds. Not a penny under. And dirt 
cheap to the nation that buys it. I shall let it go at that, 
though I could make ten times as much if I held on. I 
shall take it up to the First Lord of the Admiralty in a 
week or two; and if he seems to be a civil deserving sort 
of person I shall do business with him. It's not every day,
Doyle, that a man comes into his office with the Atlantic 
under one arm and the Pacific under the other. Eh, 
what?"

Doyle tried hard to hold himself in check, but abandoned the effort and laughed himself tired. After a scowl of fury Budd joined in.

"Of course, it seems absurd to you," he shouted, 
stamping about the room and gesticulating wildly. "Well, 
I dare say it would to me if any other fellow had worked 
it out... Now I'll show you. What an unbelieving Jew 
you are, trying to look interested, and giggling at the 
back of your throat! In the first place, I have discovered a
a method — which I won't tell you — of increasing the attractive power of a magnet a hundredfold. Have you 
grasped that?"

"Yes."

"Very good. You are also aware, I presume, that mod- 
ern projectiles are either made of or tipped with steel. Itm
may possibly have come to your ears that magnets attract 
steel. Permit me now to show you a small experiment." 
He bent over his apparatus, and Doyle heard the snapping of electricity. "This," he continued, going across to a
a packing-case, "is a saloon pistol, and will be exhibited 
in the museums of the next century as being the weapon 
with which the new era was inaugurated. Into the breech 
I place a Boxer cartridge, specially provided for experimental purposes with a steel bullet. I aim pointblank at 
the dab of red sealing-wax upon the wall, which is four 
inches above the magnet. I am an absolutely dead shot. 
I fire. You will now advance, and satisfy yourself that 
the bullet is flattened upon the end of the magnet, after 
which you will apologize to me for that grin."

Doyle had to admit that it was so.

"I'll tell you what I'd do!" cried Budd. "I'm prepared 
to put that magnet in my wife's bonnet, and to let you 
fire six shots straight at her face. How's that for a test? 
You wouldn't mind, dear?"

Though his wife did not seem to mind, Doyle did.

"Of course, you see that the whole thing is to scale," 
Budd went on. "My warship of the future carries at her 
prow and stern a magnet which shall be as much larger 
than that as the big shell will be larger than this tiny 
bullet. Or I might have a separate raft, possibly, to carry 
my apparatus. My ship goes into action. What happens 
then, Doyle? Ah, what! Every shot fired at her goes 
smack on to the magnet. There's a reservoir below into 
which they drop when the electric circuit is broken. 
After every action they are sold by auction for old 
metal, and the result divided as prize money among the 
crew. But think of it, man! I tell you it is an absolute 
impossibility for a shot to strike any ship which is provided with my apparatus. And then look at the cheapness. You don't want armor. You want nothing. Any ship that floats becomes invulnerable with one of these. The warship of the future will cost anything from seven 
pound ten. You're grinning again; but if you give me a 
magnet and a Brixham trawler with a seven-pounder gun 
I'll show sport to the finest battleship afloat."

"Well, there must be some flaw about this," said 
Doyle. "If your magnet is so strong as all that, you 
would have your own broadside boomeranging back 
upon you."

"Not a bit of it! There's a big difference between a 
shot flying away from you with all its muzzle velocity, 
and another one which is coming towards you and only 
needs a slight deflection to strike the magnet. Besides, by 
breaking the circuit I can take off the influence when I
am firing my own broadside. Then I connect, and instantly become invulnerable."

"And your nails and screws?"

"The warship of the future will be bolted together by wood."

On a later occasion he told Doyle that he had failed 
to impress the authorities with the vital need of his invention. "I'm very sorry for my country," he lamented, 
"but there is no more command of the seas for her. I'll 
have to let the thing go to the Germans. It's not my 
fault. They must not blame me when the smash comes. 
I put the thing before the Admiralty, and I could have 
made a board school understand it in half the time. Such l
letters, Doyle! Colney Hatch on blue paper. When the 
war comes, and I show those letters, somebody will be 
hanged. Questions about this — questions about that. At 
last they asked me what I proposed to fasten my magnet 
to. I answered to any solid impenetrable object, such as t
the head of an Admiralty official. Well, that broke the 
whole thing up. They wrote with their compliments, 
and they were returning my apparatus. I wrote with my 
compliments, and they might go to the devil. And so 
ends a great historical incident, Doyle — eh, what?"

When Doyle went to bed that first evening he realized 
that Budd had neither explained his success as a doctor 
nor broached the subject of their partnership; and when 
he was awakened the following morning by Budd, who 
charged into the room in his dressing-gown, vaulted 
over the rail at the bottom of the bed, and did a somersault which brought his heels on to Doyle's pillow, it 
was quite a different topic that his host had come to 
discuss.

"I tell you one of the first things I mean to do, Doyle.I
I mean to have a paper of my own. We'll start a weekly 
paper here, you and I, and we'll make them sit up all
round. We'll have an organ of our own, just like every 
French politician. If anyone crosses us, we'll make them 
wish they had never been born. Eh, what, laddie? What 
d'you think? So clever, Doyle, that everybody's bound 
to read it, and so scathing that it will just fetch out 
blisters every time. Don't you think we could?"

"What politics?"

"Oh, curse the politics! Red pepper well rubbed in, 
that's my idea of a paper. Call it the Scorpion. Chaff the 
Mayor and the Council until they call a meeting and 
hang themselves. I'll do the snappy paragraphs, and you 
would do the fiction and the poetry. I thought about it 
during the night, and my wife has written to Murdoch's 
to get an estimate for the printing. We might get our 
first number out this day week."

"My dear chap!" gasped Doyle.

"I want you to start a novel this morning. You won't 
get many patients at first, and you'll have lots of time." 

"But I've never written a novel in my life."

"A properly balanced man can do anything he sets his 
hand to. He's got every possible quality inside himself, 
and all he wants is the will to develop it."

"Could you write a novel yourself?"

"Of course I could. Such a novel, Doyle, that when 
they'd read the first chapter the folk would just sit 
groaning until the second came out. They'd wait in rows 
outside my door in the hope of hearing what was coming 
next. By Crums, I'll go and begin it now!"

Another somersault over the end of the bed, and he 
was gone.

Apart from Budd's extravagant claims and mannerisms, 
Doyle was much struck by the aphorisms which peppered his conversation, e.g., "The greatest monument ever erected to Napoleon Bonaparte was the British National Debt," and "The principal export of Great Britain to the United States is the United States." Doyle wished
he could jot them all down in a notebook, but his memory was fairly retentive.

After breakfast all three got into a carriage and drove to Budd's business address, a square whitewashed building with DR. BUDD in enormous letters on a brass plate by the door, and the words "May Be Consulted Gratis from Ten to Four" underneath. The hall was crowded with people.

"How many here?" asked Budd.

"A hundred and forty, sir," answered the page boy. 

"All the waiting-rooms full?"

"Yes, sir."

"Courtyard full?"

"Yes, sir."

"Stable full?"

"Yes, sir."

"Coach-house full?"

"There's still room in the coach-house, sir."

"Ah, I'm sorry we haven't got a crowded day for you, 
Doyle. Of course, we can't command these things, and 
must take them as they come. Now then, now then, 
make a gangway, can't you?" he bawled at the patients. 

"Come here and see the waiting-room. Pooh! what an 
atmosphere! Why on earth can't you open the windows 
for yourselves? I never saw such folk! There are thirty 
people in this room, Doyle, and not one with sense 
enough to open a window to save himself from suffocation."

"I tried, sir, but there's a screw through the sash," said one of the patients.

"Ah, my boy, you'll never get on in the world if you 
can't open a window without raising a sash," said Budd, 
who promptly seized the man's umbrella and stuck it 
through two of the panes of glass. "That's the way! Boy, 
see that the screw is taken out. Now then, Doyle, come 
along and we'll get to work."

They climbed to the top floor, every room on the 
way being filled with patients. Budd marched into a large 
chamber which contained nothing but two wooden 
chairs and a table with two books and a stethoscope 
on it.

"This," he announced, "is my consulting-room. It 
doesn't look like four or five thousand a year, does it? 
Now, there is an exactly similar one opposite which you 
can have for yourself. I'll send across any surgical cases 
which may turn up. Today, however, I think you had 
better stay with me, and see how I work things."

"I should very much like to," said Doyle.

"There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients," remarked Budd, 
sitting on the table and swinging his legs. "The most 
obvious is that you must never let them see that you 
want them. It should be pure condescension on your 
part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you 
throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break 
your patients in early, and keep them well to heel. Never 
make the fatal mistake of being polite to them. Many 
foolish young men fall into this habit, and are ruined in 
consequence. Now this is my form." He rushed to the 
door and bellowed downstairs: "Stop your confounded 
jabbering down there! I might as well be living above a 
poultry show!" Dead silence ensued. "There, you see! 
They will think ever so much more of me for that."

"But don't they get offended?"

"I'm afraid not. I have a name for this sort of thing 
now, and they have come to expect it. But an offended 
patient — I mean a thoroughly insulted one — is the finest 
advertisement in the world. If it is a woman, she runs 
clacking about among her friends until your name becomes a household word, and they all pretend to sympathize with her, and agree among themselves that you
must be a remarkably discerning man. I quarreled with 
one man about the state of his gall duct, and it ended by 
my throwing him down the stairs. What was the result? 
He talked so much about it that the whole village from 
which he came, sick and well, trooped to see me. The 
little country practitioner who had been buttering them 
up for a quarter of a century found that he might as well 
put up his shutters. It's human nature, my boy, and you 
can't alter it. Eh, what? You make yourself cheap and 
you become cheap. You put a high price on yourself and 
they rate you at that price. Suppose I set up in Harley 
Street tomorrow, and made it all nice and easy, with 
hours from ten to three, do you think I should get a 
patient? I might starve first. How would I work it? I 
should let it be known that I only saw patients from 
midnight until two in the morning, and that bald-headed 
people must pay double. That would set people talking, 
their curiosity would be stimulated, and in four months 
the street would be blocked all night. Eh, what? Laddie, 
you'd go yourself. That's my principle here. I often 
come in of a morning and send them all about their 
business, tell them I'm going off to the country for a day. 
I turn away forty pounds, and it's worth four hundred 
as an advertisement!"

"But I understood from the plate that the consultations were gratis?"

"So they are, but they have to pay for the medicine. 
And if a patient wishes to come out of turn he has to pay 
half a guinea for the privilege. There are generally about 
twenty every day who would rather pay that than wait 
several hours. But mind you, Doyle, don't you make any 
mistake about this! All this would go for nothing if you 
had not something solid behind — I cure them. That's the 
point. I take cases that others have despaired of, and I 
cure them right off. All the rest is only to bring them
here. But once here I keep them on my merits. It would 
all be a flash in the pan but for that. Now come along 
and see my wife's department."

They went to the end of the passage, and found Mrs. Budd happily engaged in making pills.

"The best dispenser in the world," said Budd, giving 
her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "You see how 
I do it, Doyle. I write on a label what the prescription 
is, and make a sign which shows how much is to be 
charged. The man comes along the passage and passes 
the label through the pigeon-hole. My wife makes it up, 
passes out the bottle, and takes the money. Now come on 
and clear some of these folk out of the house."

Doyle then witnessed a series of scenes such as he 
could never have imagined or believed possible. Hour 
after hour the patients filed in and departed with their 
prescriptions. Budd's antics were incredible. He yelled, 
he raved, he cursed, he knocked his patients about, 
thumped them, prodded them, barged them against the 
wall, pulled them in, flung them out, and occasionally 
varied the proceedings by rushing from the room and 
bawling at the lot from the landing. Sometimes he did 
not even allow them to utter a word, but with a loud 
"Ssh!" ran at them, hit them on the chests, listened to 
their hearts, wrote their labels, and shot them through 
the door. He paralyzed one old lady the moment she entered by screaming, "You've been drinking too much 
tea! You are suffering from tea poisoning!" Before she 
could utter a syllable he seized her black mantle, dragged 
her to the table, and shoved a copy of Taylor's Medical 
Jurisprudence under her nose. "Put your hand on the 
book," he thundered, "and swear that for fourteen days 
you will drink nothing but cocoa." She lifted up her 
eyes, swore the oath, and was instantly hustled off to the 
dispensary. A portly male made a dignified entrance and 
was about to explain his symptoms when Budd caught
him by the armholes of his waistcoat, thrust him backwards into the passage and downstairs into the street, 
and staggered the passers-by by bellowing after him, 
"You eat too much, drink too much, and sleep too much! 
Knock down a policeman, and come again when they let 
you out." Another female, who complained of a "sinking 
feeling," was advised to take her medicine, "and if that 
does no good, swallow the cork, for there is nothing 
better when you are sinking."

While Doyle was laughing himself silly throughout 
this amazing exhibition he was conscious of the fact that 
Budd showed considerable skill in diagnosis and not a 
little psychological insight, though his use of drugs was 
both heroic and alarming, his idea being that doctors 
were too timid; they were afraid of poisoning their patients; whereas he believed that the whole art of medicine lay in judicious poisoning, and with him it was a 
case of kill or cure. In many cases he relied on his 
personal magnetism; his confidence gave his patients 
confidence; his vitality re-charged theirs. "My dear," he 
said to a girl, swaying her about by the shoulders, his 
nose about three inches from hers, "you'll feel better 
tomorrow at a quarter to ten, and at twenty past you'll 
be as well as ever you were in your life. Now keep your 
eye on the clock and see if I'm not right." In the majority of such cases the trick worked.

At the close of that first day Budd was able to put 
£32 8s. 6d. into his canvas bag, which, to Doyle's acute 
embarrassment, he paraded through the streets, holding 
it at arm's length and jingling it, his wife and Doyle on 
either side of him, like acolytes supporting a priest.
"I always make a point of walking through the doctors' quarter," said Budd. "We are passing through it now. They all come to their windows and gnash their teeth and dance until I am out of sight."

Doyle thought such behavior undignified and unfriendly, and said so, Mrs. Budd backing him up. Budd replied that his wife was annoyed because the other doctors' wives wouldn't call on her. "Look at that, my dear," he cried, shaking the bag; "that's better than having a 
lot of brainless women drinking tea and cackling in your 
drawing-room. I've had a big card printed, Doyle, saying that we don't desire to increase the circle of our acquaintance. The maid has orders to show it to every suspicious person who calls."

"Why should you not make money at your practice, and yet remain on good terms with your professional brethren?" Doyle wanted to know. "You speak as if the two things were incompatible."

"So they are. What's the good of beating about the 
bush, laddie? My methods are all unprofessional, and I 
break every law of medical etiquette as often as I can 
think of it. You know very well that the British Medical 
Association would hold up their hands in horror if it 
could see what you have seen today."

"But why not conform to professional etiquette?"

"Because I know better. My boy, I'm a doctor's son, 
and I've seen too much of it. I was born inside the machine, and I've seen all the wires. All this etiquette is a 
dodge for keeping the business in the hands of the older 
men. It's to hold the young men back, and to stop the 
holes by which they might slip through to the front. 
I've heard my father say so a score of times. He had the 
largest practice in Bristol, and yet he was absolutely 
devoid of brains. He slipped into it through seniority 
and decorum. No pushing, but take your turn. Very 
well, laddie, when you're at the top of the line, but how 
about it when you've just taken your place at the tail? 
When I'm on the top rung I shall look down and say, 
'Now, you youngsters, we are going to have very. strict 
etiquette, and I beg that you will come up very quietly 
and not disarrange me from my comfortable position.'
At the same time, if they do what I tell them, I shall 
look upon them as a lot of infernal blockheads. Eh, 
Doyle, what?"

Doyle completely disagreed with him.

"Well, my boy, you may disagree as much as you like, 
but if you are going to work with me you must throw 
etiquette to the devil."

"I can't do that."

"Well, if you are too clean-handed for the job you 
can clear out. We can't keep you here against your will." 

Doyle was silent, but the moment they got back he 
went upstairs and began to pack his trunk, intending to 
return to Birmingham that night. While he was doing 
so Budd walked in and made abject apologies, which 
placated Doyle.

After dinner the same evening a curious incident occurred. They were shooting steel darts out of an airgun 
in the back room when Budd suggested that Doyle 
should hold up a halfpenny between finger and thumb 
and let him knock it out. No halfpenny being available, 
Budd produced a bronze medal which Doyle held up. 
"Plonk" went the gun, and down went the medal.

"Plumb in the center," claimed Budd.

"On the contrary," said Doyle, "you never hit it at all."

"Never hit it! I must have hit it!"

"I am confident you didn't."

"Where's the dart, then?"

"Here," said Doyle, holding up his bleeding forefinger 
with the dart sticking out of it.

Budd collapsed and expressed his contrition so extravagantly that Doyle had to laugh the incident off. The darth having been extracted, and Budd having recovered, Doyle picked up the medal and read the inscription: "Presented to George Budd for Gallantry in Saving Life, January 1879."

"Hullo! you never told me about this," he exclaimed.

"What, the medal?" rejoined Budd. "Haven't you got 
one? I thought everyone had. You prefer to be select, I 
suppose. It was a little boy. You've no idea the trouble 
I had to get him in."

"Get him out, you mean."

"My dear chap, you don't understand! Anyone could 
get a child out. It's getting him in that's the bother. One 
deserves a medal for it. Then there are the witnesses; 
four shillings a day I had to pay them, and a quart of 
beer in the evenings. You see you can't pick up a child 
and carry it to the edge of a pier and throw it in. You'd 
have all sorts of complications with the parents. You 
must be patient and wait until you get a legitimate 
chance. I caught a quinsy walking up and down the pier 
before I saw my opportunity. He was rather a stolid fat 
boy, and he was sitting on the very edge, fishing. I got 
the sole of my foot on to the small of his back, and shot 
him an incredible distance. I had some little difficulty in 
getting him out, for his fishing-line got twice round my 
legs, but it all ended well, and the witnesses were as 
stanch as possible. The boy came up to thank me next 
day, and said that he was quite uninjured save for a 
bruise on the back. His parents always send me a brace 
of fowls every Christmas."

Exit Budd, and they could hear his shouts of laughter 
as he ran upstairs for his tobacco. Doyle was gravely 
inspecting the medal, which had evidently been in constant use as a target, when Mrs. Budd warned him not to 
take her husband too seriously, as he got carried away by 
his flights of fancy; to prove which she showed Doyle 
a press cutting which described how Budd had saved a 
child's life in an ice accident, nearly losing his own in 
the process.

Doyle now settled down to his job, which was not a 
very fruitful one Though a plate with his name in large
letters appeared by the outside door, and he was given a 
room opposite Budd's, his methods were not exciting 
enough to attract customers. For the first three days he 
sat in his room doing nothing while his partner gamboled and scrimmaged with his patients on the other 
side of the landing or howled at them from the top of 
the stairs. On the fourth day an old soldier entered his 
room and displayed a cancerous nose, caused by the hot 
tobacco from a short clay pipe. Doyle sent him home, 
and two days later drove out in Budd's dog-cart to operate. It was his first operation, though the patient was fortunately unaware of the fact, and he was the more nervous of the two; but the result was successful, and the old soldier was proud of the aristocratic twist Doyle 
had given his nose. After that he had a trickle of cases, 
and though his patients were very poor his takings slowly 
increased: £1 17s. 6d. the first week, £2 the second, 
£2 5s. the third, and £2 18s. the fourth.

Meanwhile Budd was forging ahead with the newspaper, for which he was already writing articles, parodies, libelous paragraphs, doggerel poems, and a novel. Anything for publicity was his motto, and Doyle saw an almanac with a large local circulation containing such entries as this:

Sep. 15. Reform Bill passed, 1867.<br />
Sep. 16. Birth of Julius Caesar.<br />
Sep. 17. Extraordinary cure by Dr. Budd of a case of dropsy in Plymouth, 1881.<br />
Sep. 18. Battle of Gravelotte, 1870.

Some months later Doyle cut an advertisement out of the 
British Medical Journal, into which it had been copied 
from the Western Morning News, and pasted it into his 
scrapbook:

"Dr. Budd's blood-tonic. This medicine is prepared 
from a prescription designed by Dr. Budd of Plymouth. 
It possesses extraordinary power in renovating the blood
and in clearing it from impurities. It is the identical medicine prescribed by him in the remarkable cure of dropsy 
effected by him in September 188i, which was classed in 
the Three Towns Almanac as one of the chief local 
events of the year. A bottle containing twenty doses forwarded to any address (carriage paid) on receipt of Post 
Office Order for three shillings and sixpence, payable to 
Dr. George Budd, i Durnford Street, Plymouth."

Budd's low opinion of the medical profession annoyed
Doyle, who felt that their motives should be primarily
humanitarian.

"Why the devil should we do all the good?" objected 
Budd. "A butcher would do good to the race, would he 
not, if he served his chops out gratis through the window? He'd be a real benefactor; but he goes on selling 
them at a shilling the pound for all that. Take the case 
of a doctor who devotes himself to sanitary science. He 
flushes out drains, and keeps down infection. You call 
him a philanthropist! Well, I call him a traitor. That's 
it, Doyle, a traitor and a renegade! Did you ever hear of 
a congress of lawyers for simplifying the law and discouraging litigation? What are the Medical Association 
and the General Council and all these bodies for? Eh, 
laddie? For encouraging the best interests of the profession. Do you suppose they do that by making the population healthy? It's about time we had a mutiny among 
the general practitioners. If I had the use of half the 
funds which the Association has, I should spend part of 
them in drain-blocking, and the rest in the cultivation of 
disease germs, and the contamination of drinking water."

Not content with founding a paper and running a 
practice that would have driven any other doctor into 
an asylum, Budd got his partner to help him build a 
stable at his business address; quite as much for his patients, thought Doyle, as for the horses. Then, too, he 
was busy on a new invention, which he called the "Budd 
Spring-Shutter Screen," an ingenious method of preventing a ship from foundering as a result of artillery fire or 
running on the rocks, a shutter descending over every 
hole made in her side. Even so his energy was not absorbed and he decided to exercise himself on a frisky 
horse. He heard of one belonging to an army officer, 
who had paid £150 for it but wanted to get rid of it for 
£70 because it was dangerous. This suited Budd, and the 
dealer brought it round. The ensuing scene proved of 
value to Doyle, as it gave him some hints for an incident in his romance Sir Nigel. Let him describe the 
original episode exactly as it occurred:

"It was a beautiful animal, coal black, with a magnificent neck and shoulders, but with a nasty backward tilt 
to its ears, and an unpleasant way of looking at you. The 
horse dealer said that our yard was too small to try the 
creature in; but Budd clambered up upon its back and 
formally took possession of it by lamming it between the 
ears with the bone handle of his whip. Then ensued one 
of the most lively ten minutes that I can remember. The 
beast justified his reputation; but Budd, although he was 
no horseman, stuck to him like a limpet. Backwards, 
forwards, sideways, on his fore feet, on his hind feet, 
with his back curved, with his back sunk, bucking and 
kicking, there was nothing the creature did not try. Budd 
was sitting alternately on his mane and on the root of his 
tail — never by any chance in the saddle — he had lost both 
stirrups, and his knees were drawn up and his heels dug 
into the creature's ribs, while his hands clawed at mane, 
saddle, or ears, whichever he saw in front of him. He 
kept his whip, however; and whenever the brute eased 
down, lammed him once more with the bone handle. His 
idea, I suppose, was to break its spirit, but he had taken 
a larger contract than he could carry through. The animal bunched his four feet together, ducked down his 
head, arched his back like a yawning cat, and gave three 
convulsive springs into the air. At the first Budd's knees
were above the saddle flaps, at the second his ankles were 
retaining a convulsive grip, at the third he flew forward  
like a stone out of a sling, narrowly missed the coping 
of the wall, broke with his head the iron bar which held 
some wire-netting, and toppled back with a thud into 
the yard. Up he bounded with the blood streaming down 
his face, and running into our half-finished stables he 
seized a hatchet, and with a bellow of rage rushed at the  
horse. I caught him by the coat and put on a fourteen-stone drag, while the horse dealer (who was as white as 
a cheese) ran off with his horse into the street. Budd 
broke away from my grip, and cursing incoherently, his 
face slobbered with blood, and his hatchet waving over 
his head, he rushed out of the yard — the most diabolical-looking ruffian you can imagine. However, luckily for 
the dealer, he had got a good start, and Budd was persuaded to come back and wash his face. We bound up 
his cut, and found him little the worse, except in his 
temper. But for me he would most certainly have paid 
seventy pounds for his insane outburst of rage against 
the animal."

Nearly every day Budd had a new plan for making 
money on an unprecedented scale. Sometimes he would 
complain of the wretched conditions of Plymouth, where 
a fellow could only scrape together a beggarly three or 
four thousand a year out of the poorest classes. He 
wanted a continent to bustle in; and once he announced 
that he would clear out and clean up South America by 
concentrating on "the eye." There was, he said, a fortune in eyes. A man grudged half a crown to cure his 
chest or throat, but he would spend his last dollar on his 
eye. There was money in ears, but the eye was a gold 
mine.

"Look here, laddie!" said he. "There's a great continent from the equator to the icebergs, and not a man in 
it who could correct an astigmatism. What do they know
of modern eye-surgery and refraction? Why, dammy, 
they don't know much about it in the provinces of England yet, let alone Brazil. Man, if you could only see it, 
there's a fringe of squinting millionaires sitting ten deep 
round the whole continent with their money in their 
hands waiting for an oculist. Eh, Doyle, what? By 
Crums, I'll come back and I'll buy Plymouth, and I'll 
give it away as a tip to the waiter."

"You propose to settle in some large city, then?"

"City! What use would a city be to me? I'm there to 
squeeze the continent. I work a town at a time. I send 
on an agent to the next to say that I am coming. 'Here's 
the chance of a lifetime,' says he; 'no need to go back 
to Europe; here's Europe come to you. Squints, cataracts, 
iritis, refractions, what you like; here's the great Signor 
Budd, right up to date and ready for anything!' In they 
come of course, droves of them, and then I arrive and 
take the money. I work Bahia while my agent prepares 
Pernambuco. When Bahia is squeezed dry I move on to 
Pernambuco, and the agent ships to Monte Video. So 
we work our way round with a trail of spectacles behind us. It'll go like clockwork. Then I load up a steamer and come home, unless I elect to buy one of their little States and run it."

"You will need to speak Spanish."

"Tut, it does not take any Spanish to stick a knife into a man's eye. All I shall want to know is 'Money down — no credit.' That's Spanish enough for me."

After Doyle had been five weeks at Plymouth his practice showed a decided upward tendency: he was beginning to make between £3 and £4 a week. Against this 
he did not seem to be on such friendly terms with the 
Budds. Sometimes he caught hostile glances from the 
wife; other times he noticed the husband glaring at him, 
and when he asked what was the matter received the 
reply, "Oh, nothing!" Between times they both behaved
quite amiably; yet he felt that something was wrong. He 
did not solve the problem until he had left them, but we 
may know the truth at once.

From the outset his mother had resented his association with Budd. She was very conscious of her ancestry. 
"Not once, nor twice, but thrice did the Plantagenets 
intermarry with us," wrote her son; "the Dukes of Brittany courted our alliance, and the Percies of Northumberland intertwined themselves with our whole illustrious 
record. So in my boyhood she would expound the matter, with hearth-brush in one hand and a glove full of 
cinders in the other, while I would sit swinging my 
knickerbocker legs, swelling with pride until my waist-coat was as tight as a sausage skin, as I contemplated the 
gulf which separated me from all other little boys who 
swang their legs upon tables." Doyle's mother was therefore pained when her boy linked his fortunes with a man 
whose behavior and opinions, as reported to her by 
Arthur, showed so unmistakably that he had no Plantagenet blood in him, and her letters were very outspoken 
on the point. Arthur defended his partner to the best of 
his ability, but the more he defended him the more violently did his mother attack him, and at last there was 
almost a breach between mother and son. Unfortunately, 
the latter, being of an honest confiding nature, did not 
burn her letters, which were extracted from his pockets 
and read by the Budds. Even so it should have been 
clear from the mother's letters that the son was taking 
their part; but Budd was of a highly suspicious nature 
and instantly smelled treason. Hence the glares and hostile glances which puzzled their unsuspecting lodger.

One evening Budd's growing antagonism flared out in 
a curious manner. They were playing billiards at a hotel, 
and at the end of the game, wanting two to win, Doyle 
pocketed the white. Instantly Budd screamed that it was
bad form. Doyle appealed to the marker, who supported 
him. Whereupon Budd began to abuse him violently, 
and when Doyle said that it was "a caddish thing to 
speak like that before the marker" Budd lifted his cue 
as if to strike his opponent; but thought better of it and 
marched out, after flinging his cue on the ground and 
half a crown at the marker. In the street his stream of 
abuse continued until Doyle checked him: "That's 
enough. I've already stood rather more than I can carry."  
For a moment or two it seemed as if there must be a 
fight between them, which might have been good for 
business but could not have cemented their partnership. 
Then Budd, with one of his characteristic quick-changes, 
burst out laughing, put his arm through Doyle's, and 
hurried him along the street, saying, "Devil of a temper 
you've got, Doyle! By Crums, it's hardly safe to go out 
with you. I never know what you're going to do next. 
Eh, what? You mustn't be peppery with me, though; 
for I mean well towards you, as you'll see before you 
get finished with me."

At last matters were brought to a head. Budd was unusually sulky one morning, and after finishing with his  patients he came stamping into Doyle's room with a savage look on his face.

"This practice is going to the devil," said he. 

"How's that?"

"It's going to little pieces, Doyle. I've been taking 
figures, and I know what I'm talking about. A month ago 
I was seeing six hundred a week. Then I dropped to five 
hundred and eighty; then to five-seventy-five; and now 
to five-sixty. What do you think of that?"

"To be honest, I don't think much of it. The summer 
is coming on. You are losing all your coughs and colds 
and sore throats. Every practice must dwindle at this 
time of year."

"That's all very well. You may put it down to that, 
but I think quite differently about it."

"What do you put it down to, then?"

"To you."

"How's that?"

"Well, you must allow that it's a very queer coincidence — if it is a coincidence — that from the day when your plate was put up my practice has taken a turn for the worse."

"I should be very sorry to think it was cause and effect. How do you think that my presence could have hurt you?"

"I'll tell you frankly, old chap," said Budd, with something between a smile and a sneer. "You see, many of 
my patients are simple country folk, half imbecile for 
the most part, but then the half-crown of an imbecile 
is as good as any other half-crown. They come to my 
door and they see two names, and their silly jaws begin 
to drop, and they say to each other, 'There's two of 'em  
here. It's Dr. Budd we want to see, but if we go in we'll 
be shown as likely as not to Dr. Doyle.' So it ends in 
some cases in their not coming in at all. Then there are  
the women. Women don't care a toss whether you are a 
Solomon, or whether you are hot from an asylum. It's 
all personal with them. You fetch them, or you don't 
fetch them. I know how to work them, but they won't 
come if they think they're going to be turned over to 
anybody else. That's what I put the falling away down
to."

"Well," said Doyle, "that's easily set right."

He walked downstairs, followed by Budd and his 
wife, got a hammer, and wrenched his name-plate from 
the side of the door.

"That won't interfere with you any more," he remarked.

"What do you intend to do now?" asked Budd.

"Oh, I shall find plenty to do. Don't you worry about that."

"But this is all rot," said Budd, picking up the plate. 

"Come along upstairs and let us see where we stand." 
Back they went, all feeling very awkward.

"It's this way," said Doyle. "I am very much obliged to you, and to you, Mrs. Budd, for all your kindness and good wishes, but I did not come here to spoil your practice; and, after what you have told me, it is quite impossible for me to work with you any more."

"Well, my boy, I am inclined myself to think that we 
should do better apart; and that's my wife's idea also, 
only she is too polite to say so."

"It's a time for plain speaking," Doyle went on, "and 
we may as well thoroughly understand each other. If I 
have done your practice any harm, I assure you that I 
am heartily sorry, and I shall do all I can to repair it. 
I cannot say more."

"What are you going to do, then?"

"I shall either go to sea or else start a practice on my own account."

"But you have no money."

"Neither had you when you started."

"Ah, that was different. Still, it may be that you are right. You'll find it a stiff pull at first."

"Oh, I am quite prepared for that."

"Well, you know, Doyle, I feel that I am responsible to you to some extent, since I persuaded you to leave another job."

"It was a pity, but it can't be helped."

"We must do what we can to make up. Now I tell 
you what I am prepared to do. We were talking about it 
this morning, and we agreed that if we allowed you a 
pound a week until you got your legs under you, it 
would encourage you to start for yourself, and you 
could pay it back as soon as you were able."

"It is very kind of you," said Doyle. "If you would let 
the matter stand just now, I should like just to take a 
short walk by myself, and to think it all over."

Doyle went and sat on the Hoe, and brooded over a 
cigar. He began by feeling depressed, but the flowers 
and the spring air soon restored him, and he even experienced a sudden thrill of happiness at the thought that 
his mother would be pleased, that the strain of the last 
two weeks would be removed, and that at last he would 
be on his own. "As a drift of rooks passed cawing over 
my head, I began cawing also in the overflow of my 
spirits." On reaching their house he told Budd that he 
had decided to accept his offer, and friendliness was re-established over a bottle of champagne. They consulted 
a map, and it was agreed that Doyle should try his luck 
at Tavistock.

But his plans were upset the following morning. While 
he was packing before breakfast Mrs. Budd knocked at 
his door. "Would you mind coming down and seeing 
George?" she begged. "He has been very strange all 
night, and I am afraid that he is ill."

Doyle went down and found Budd sitting up in bed 
with a pencil, a sheet of paper and a clinical thermometer 
before him.

"Deuced interesting thing," said the patient. "Come 
and look at this temperature chart. I've been taking it 
every quarter of an hour since I couldn't sleep, and it's 
up and down till it looks like the mountains in the 
geography books. We'll have some drugs in — eh, what, 
Doyle? — and, by Crums, we'll revolutionize all their 
ideas about fevers. I'll write a pamphlet from personal 
experiment that will make all their books clean out of 
date, and they'll have to tear them up and wrap sandwiches in them."

Doyle noted that his temperature was above 102° and that his pulse was not normal. "Any symptoms?" he asked.

"Tongue like a nutmeg-grater," said Budd, thrusting 
it out. "Frontal headache, renal pains, no appetite, and a 
mouse nibbling inside my left elbow. That's as far as 
we've got at present."

"I'll tell you what it is, Budd. You have got a touch of rheumatic fever, and you will have to lie by for a bit."

"Lie by be hanged! I've got a hundred people to see 

"Lie by be hanged! I've got a hundred people to see 
today. My boy, I must be down there if I have the rattle 
in my throat. I didn't build up a practice to have it 
ruined by a few ounces of lactic acid."

"George dear, you can easily build up another one," 
cooed his wife. "You must do what Dr. Doyle tells you."

"Well," said Doyle, "you'll want looking after, and 
your practice will want looking after, and I am quite 
ready to do both. But I won't take the responsibility 
unless you give me your word that you will do what you 
are told."

"If I am to have any doctoring it must come from 
you, laddie; for if I was to turn my toes up in the public 
square, there's not a man here who would do more than 
sign my certificate. By Crums, they might get the salts 
and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for 
there's no love lost between us. But I want to go down 
to the practice all the same."

"It's out of the question. You know the sequel of this complaint. You'll have endocarditis, embolism, thrombosis, metastatic abscesses — you know the danger as well as I do."

"I take my complaints one at a time, thank you," 
laughed Budd. "I wouldn't be so greedy as to have all 
those — eh, Doyle, what? — when many another poor devil 
hasn't got an ache to his back." The bed rocked with his 
laughter. "Do what you like, laddie — but I say, mind, if
anything should happen, no tomfoolery over my grave. 
If you put so much as a stone there, by Crums, Doyle, 
I'll come back in the dead of the night and plant it on 
the pit of your stomach."

For three weeks Doyle doctored Budd, and attempted 
to doctor Budd's patients. He could not prevent Budd 
from experimenting on himself, from covering reams of 
paper, from building models of his spring-shutter screen, 
and from firing off a pistol at his magnetic target; and 
he could not shriek at Budd's patients or knock them 
about or dance round them or prophesy miraculous cures 
or yell insults from the landing; but somehow Budd recovered, after which his business recovered.

At the close of those three weeks Doyle received another stinging letter from his mother. He had written to say he was leaving Budd, but by the next post he had written to say he was nursing him and keeping his practice going. This was altogether too much for the good woman, who replied after an interval that he was dragging his family honor in the dirt by continued association with a bankrupt swindler. The contents of this letter having been absorbed by the Budds without his knowledge, Doyle was naturally surprised when they suddenly 
became glacial, and rather upset when Budd, who was just up again, asked him how much he wanted for looking after the business.

"Oh, it was all in the day's work," said Doyle. 

"Thank you, I had rather have strict business," answered Budd. "You know where you are then, but a favor is a thing with no end to it. What d'you put it at?" 

"I never thought about it in that light."

"Well, think about it now. A locum would have cost me four guineas a week. Make it twenty. Well, I promised to allow you a pound a week, and you were to pay it back. I'll put twenty pounds to your credit account, and you'll have it every week as sure as Saturday."

"Thank you," said Doyle. "If you are so anxious to 
make a business matter of it, you can arrange it so."

Their manner made it clear that they wanted him to 
go, and on the day Budd resumed operations he set off 
for Tavistock. But as there seemed to be more doctors 
than patients in Tavistock, he returned to Plymouth, 
where he had such a cold reception that he asked Budd 
what was wrong. Budd evaded the question with a 
forced laugh and a reference to his thin skin. This time 
Doyle determined to cut the painter, and as conditions 
at Portsmouth seemed analogous to those at Plymouth he 
boarded a steamer the following day with a brass plate, 
a hat-box, a trunk containing a stethoscope, a second pair 
of boots, two suits of clothes and some linen, a total 
capital of about £6 in his purse, and a piece of advice 
from Budd, who saw him off: "You rely upon me, laddie. Get a good house in a central position, put up your plate and hold on by your toe-nails. Charge little or nothing until you get a connection, and none of your professional haw-dammy or you are a broken man. I'll see that you don't stop steaming for want of coal."

Thus he left Plymouth, in complete ignorance of the real cause that had driven him forth, and wholly unconscious that Budd, in trying to ruin him as a doctor, had helped to make him as an author.


=== 4. Doctor Doyle ===

He arrived at Portsmouth on a July afternoon in 1882 
feeling strangely elated. Naturally self-reliant, he en 
joyed the prospect of having to depend solely upon his 
own energy and ability; and he gave expression to his 
exultation by cheering a regiment of soldiers about to 
embark for Malta. The first thing to be done was to find 
temporary lodgings. Leaving his luggage at the office 
he took a tramcar into the town, the conductor advising 
him to get off at a "shabby-genteel kind of thorough-fare" where there were innumerable apartments to be let. He rang the bell of the first establishment that took 
his fancy, where he was informed that a sitting-room 
could be had for 13s. a week. Never having hired a room 
before, he did not know whether this was a reasonable 
figure, and tried the experiment of raising his eyebrows 
in the hope of lowering the price. It was successful: the 
rent was reduced to 10s. 6d. Wondering whether a further reduction could be obtained by similar means, he again looked surprised, adding an ejaculation of amazement to be on the safe side; but this time the landlady's  expression made it clear that the bidding was over, and
he made the only kind of retreat that occurred to him. 

"Your rooms are quite clean?"

"Quite clean, sir."

"No vermin?"

"The officers of the garrison come sometimes."

This might have been taken in two ways, but he decided to take it in the more respectable of the two, and having ordered tea he left to fetch his belongings.

As it was a lovely evening he went for a walk after tea
to inspect his new surroundings. Thinking that his 
future practice would probably depend to a large extent 
on his personal appearance, and wishing to start well, hep
put on his frock-coat and top-hat and sallied forth with 
his metal-headed walking stick. He wandered along the 
common that lies between the houses and the beach and 
sat down for an hour near the band. But the sight of the 
families enjoying themselves made him feel lonely and 
"music nearly always puts me into the minor key; so 
there came a time when I could stand it no longer, and 
I set off to find my way back to my lodgings."

At the junction of several streets a crowd had gathered; and though the last thing in the world he wanted 
at that moment was to celebrate his arrival by engaging 
in a free fight, his curiosity got the better of him and 
he pushed his way to the front. A burly, red-faced, 
drunken man was kicking his wife, who, with a baby in 
her arms, was trying to entice him home before he had 
reached a condition in which he would have to be 
carried there. The crowd greeted each kick with a cry 
of "Shame!" which had the effect of applause on the 
drunkard, who increased his efforts. Doyle's impulse 
was to go bald-headed at the brute and knock him out; 
but a sudden memory of what and where he was 
steadied him, and he tried conciliation. "Come, come, 
my lad! Pull yourself together," he said, placing his 
hand on the man's shoulder. His advice was taken with
exceptional rapidity. The man pulled himself smartly 
together, and then let fly at Doyle, whose chin was up, 
catching him on the throat and making him swallow 
several times in quick succession. In an instant they were 
at it, the crowd dancing round them in an ecstasy of 
delight and yelling encouragement to the drunkard, 
who, being two inches shorter than Doyle and less pre- 
sentably dressed, became the favorite. Doyle's top-hat 
was down to his ears, and he soon found himself locked 
in the arms of a man who had no respect for his frock-coat and kid gloves. It was an unpleasant situation for 
a newly arrived doctor to find himself in; and though 
he was a good enough boxer to take care of himself, 
his opponent was so tough that he made little impression 
on him. The suddenness of the attack had placed him 
at a disadvantage, and he was about to adopt a more 
formidable strategy when the matter was taken out of 
his hands. The crowd, swaying with excitement, gave 
them little space, and at last one of the onlookers, a 
rough jersey-clad sailor, was pushed between them. 
Doyle's opponent being too drunk and too furious to 
discriminate between a doctor and a sailor, he caught 
the latter a swinging smack on the ear. With a yell of 
fury and a stream of obscenity the sailor went for him; 
and Doyle retired. The sounds of strife were audible 
from the door of his lodging, and as he let himself in, 
he felt greatly relieved that his first public appearance  
at Portsmouth would not be in the police court.

For a week Doyle worked, or rather walked, hard in 
search of a "desirable residence" to which he could 
attach his plate and for which he would not have to 
pay rent in advance. After obtaining a map of the town, 
he studied it closely and planned a number of excursions 
which would take him through every street in Portsmouth and Southsea. Immediately after breakfast each 
morning he set out, walked till lunch, which cost him
threepence, and walked again till it was time for tea. 
At the end of a week his map was marked with crosses 
at all the empty houses and circles at all the doctors' 
residences, and he had picked on a house in Southsea 
called Bush Villa which was only £40 a year, plus another £10 for taxes, and seemed ideal for his purpose, 
being close to the junction of four roads, with a church 
on one side and a hotel on the other. Having satisfied 
himself that he could find nothing better, he called on 
the agent, who said that he must sign a year's agreement 
and pay a quarter's rent in advance.

"In advance?" said Doyle, feeling very uncomfortable, but putting on a manner of complete indifference. 

"It is usual."

"Or references?"

"Well, that depends, of course, upon the references."

"Not that it matters much. Still, if it is the same to the 
firm, I may as well pay by the quarter, as I shall do 
afterwards."

"What names did you propose to give?"

Doyle casually gave the name of his uncle Henry 
Doyle, a C.B., manager of the National Gallery in 
Dublin, and that of Dr. Budd. The agent was duly impressed, and, restraining an impulse to snatch the key 
from the man's hand, Doyle went along to view his 
property. "It was my own house — all my very own! I 
shut the door again, the noise of the street died down, 
and I had, in that empty, dust-strewn hall, such a sense 
of soothing privacy as had never come to me before. 
In all my life it was the first time that I had ever stood 
upon boards which were not paid for by another." He 
examined the two rooms on the ground floor, his high 
spirits impelling him to do a step dance in each, descended to the basement, climbed to the first floor, and 
finally to the second, from the windows of which he 
surveyed the gray backs of houses, some green tree-tops, and patches of blue sky between drifting clouds. 
A sudden sense of his own personality and of his responsibility to something far greater than himself came 
upon him, and he knelt down to pray. But though he 
tried to express his emotion in words he found that the 
old phrases had lost their meaning for him because the 
conventional idea of God as a magnified man who had 
to be asked, praised, and thanked, was no longer valid; 
and his prayer was so full of qualifying clauses that it 
seemed like a legal petition. Yet it comforted him and 
he felt the better for it as he went downstairs.

His first job was to obtain drugs and furniture. He 
ordered £12, worth of tinctures, infusions, pills, powders, ointments, and bottles at a wholesale house, giving 
Budd's name to ensure credit and prompt delivery; and 
he went down to an auction sale in Portsea that same 
evening where he collected two small tables, three 
chairs, a metal umbrella-stand, some curtains, a square 
of red drugget, a small iron bed, a fender, a toilet set, 
and three pictures, for just over £3. Next morning he 
moved in, suffering a spasm of shyness as he caught 
sight of his plate, which had been affixed to the railings 
by an ironmonger the previous evening. Then he set to 
work. With a broom that he had bought on the way, 
he swept out the hall and groundfloor rooms, and went 
upstairs to repeat the process, with the result that the 
lower rooms and hall were once more covered with 
dust and had to be swept again. Next came the problem 
of giving the house an appearance of being furnished: 
a little had to go a long way. The decorative key-note 
of the hall was a stern simplicity: an oakum mat, an 
umbrella-stand, and three pegs (6d.) on which his two 
hats reposed to give an impression of realism. Depressed 
by the large amount of bare floor still visible, he fixed a 
curtain about half-way down the hall, "draping it back, 
so that it had a kind of Oriental look, and excited a
vague idea of suites of apartments beyond. It was a fine 
effect, and I was exceedingly proud of it." The most 
important feature, however, was the consulting-room, 
which was the only room in the house he could furnish 
at all and the only room he would be able to furnish 
for some time to come. The bit of red drugget occupied 
the center of the floor, the effect heightened by brass-headed nails; but it looked like "a postage stamp in the 
middle of an envelope." The table stood on the carpet, 
and three medical books, a stethoscope, and dresser's 
case stood on the table. It took him about ten minutes 
to decide where the chairs should be placed to best 
advantage. One had to go behind the table, and at length 
he determined to place another on the right and the third 
in front of the table. The three pictures — "Spring," "The 
Banjo Players" and "Windsor Castle" — he nailed to three 
of the walls, and having placed the fender where fenders 
are usually placed, and his other table in the window, 
he darkened the room by fixing up the curtains and 
drawing them fairly closely together, "which toned 
everything down, and made the dark corners look furnished." The back room on the same floor was to be his 
kitchen-dining-room. Fortunately it contained a gas 
bracket, over which he suspended a kettle by driving a 
piece of wood into the wall. "The attraction of the idea 
was that there was no immediate expense, and many 
things would have happened before I was called upon 
to pay the gas bill." The furniture of this room consisted 
of his box, in which he could keep his food and on 
which he could sit and eat it. Even less thought and 
effort were given to his bedroom, as he only had a bed, 
a basin and a jug; but a packing-case which he found 
in the yard made a reasonably good wash-hand stand. 
The first few nights he slept in his overcoat on the iron 
bed, with Bristowe's Principles of Medicine wrapped in 
his second suit of clothes under his head; but later he
received blankets, sheets, a pillow and so forth from 
his mother, and made a mattress out of the straw and 
sacking in which his medicine bottles arrived.

That first day he was content to sit in his house reveling in the sense of privacy and the joy of proprietor-ship. In the evening he went out and bought half a 
pound of tea, a pound of sugar, a tin of Swiss milk and 
a tin of American potted meat, after which his total 
wealth was reduced to something under £2; but he did 
not worry about the future because he had written to 
Budd the moment he had taken the house and expected 
to receive the first weekly sum promised by his late 
partner in a day or two. He could not, of course, afford 
a servant, so had to face the prospect of opening the 
door to his patients, polishing his plate, keeping the 
front of his house presentable, cleaning the windows and 
dusting the interior. The more public part of these duties 
must, he felt, be reserved for the night-time.

His first week's callers were unprofitable. The curate 
of the parish came to express a wish that he should 
attend divine service, was shocked to discover that he 
thought Jesus Christ "a frail mortal like ourselves," and 
hurried away in a condition of speechless indignation. 
His next visitor looked more promising. When the bell 
rang he rushed into the hall and saw through the glass 
panel a respectably dressed bearded man, wearing a top-hat. Though he had thrilled at the thought of his first 
patient, he was nervous now that the moment had come 
and for an instant felt that he would not open the door; 
but he mastered the weakness and opened the door with 
an "air of insouciance, as though I had happened to find 
myself in the hall, and did not care to trouble the maid 
to ascend the stairs."

"Dr. Conan Doyle?"

"Pray step in."

To hide his nervousness he affected an extravagant eniality. Entering the consulting-room the man took a eat and coughed huskily.

"Ah!" said Doyle, "bronchial, I perceive. These summer colds are a little trying."

"Yes, I've had it some time."

"With a little care and treatment..."

"It's not about that I've come."

"No?" Doyle's heart sank.

"No, doctor. It's about a small sum that's due on the meter."

Apparently the previous tenant had gone off owing 
the gas company 8s. 6d., but though the sum was small 
it was too large for the present tenant. After a certain 
amount of hum-ing and ha-ing, Doyle said he would 
look into the matter "and so escaped for the moment, 
badly shaken but still solvent." Before leaving the man 
volunteered a number of details concerning his bronchial 
trouble, but as he was in the hands of another doctor, 
Doyle did not even take an academic interest in the 
subject.

Such disappointments were slight compared with the 
blow that fell upon him a few mornings after his arrival.
He received a letter from Budd which clarified a previous mystery but clouded his future. "When the maid 
was arranging your room after your departure," it ran, 
"she cleared some pieces of torn paper from under the 
grate. Seeing my name upon them, she brought them, as 
in duty bound, to her mistress, who pasted them together and found that they formed a letter from your 
mother to you, in which I am referred to in the vilest 
terms, such as 'a bankrupt swindler' and 'the unscrupulous Budd.' I can only say that we are astonished that 
you could have been a party to such a correspondence 
while you were a guest under our roof, and we refuse 
to have anything more to do with you in any shape or 
form."

From motives of economy Doyle had given up smoking, but the situation called for a pipe, which he managed 
to fill by collecting the tobacco-dust from the linings of 
his pockets. Then he "smoked the whole thing over." 
Surely, he thought, the Budds must have realized that 
his mother's attack was in answer to his defense. "Why 
should we write a duet each saying the same thing?" 
Besides, it was not his habit to tear up letters and scatter 
them in the grate; he usually let them accumulate until 
his pockets were bursting. At this point in his reflections  
he searched the jacket he had usually worn at Plymouth, 
and almost the first letter he opened was the one from 
which Budd had quoted. Obviously therefore the picture 
of the Budds piecing the letter together, though funny, 
was a fake. At last he began to understand Budd's explosions of temper and the hostility of Mrs. Budd: they 
had made a daily practice of going through his pockets 
and reading his correspondence. But in that case why 
had not Budd taxed him with treachery to his face? 
Presumably because he could not do so without confessing that he had played the spy. Having considered the 
matter from every angle, Doyle came to the conclusion 
that Budd had lured him on with promises in order to 
abandon him the moment he had committed himself, 
with the result that he would have to compound with 
his creditors and be what his mother had called Budd: 
a bankrupt swindler. Budd's villainy was inexplicable to 
Doyle and left its trace in his writings, which are peppered with blackguards whose behavior has the same 
groundless and nightmare quality. "It was as though in 
the guise and dress of a man I had caught a suddden 
glimpse of something subhuman — of something so outside my own range of thought that I was powerless 
against it." Doyle replied briefly to Budd: "I said that 
his letter had been a source of gratification to me, as it 
removed the only cause for disagreement between my
mother and myself. She had always thought him a black-guard, and I had always defended him; but I was forced 
now to confess that she had been right from the beginning. I said enough to show him that I saw through his 
whole plot; and I wound up by assuring him that if he 
thought he had done me any harm he had made a great 
mistake; for I had every reason to believe that he had 
unintentionally forced me into the very opening which 
I had most desired myself."

To finish with Budd. His business declined when the 
novelty of his methods wore off and the findings of one 
or two coroner's inquests suggested that his use of drugs 
was unconventional. His abnormally suspicious nature 
made his last years exciting. He was afflicted with the 
notion that someone was trying to poison him with copper, and he took the most extravagant precautions, sitting 
at meals with a complicated chemical apparatus and innumerable retorts and bottles at his side, and testing each 
dish before eating it. He died in the late eighties, leaving 
his wife very little money on which to maintain his 
memory.

Doyle now had to face life with not much more than 
a pound in his pocket and nothing in prospect wherewith 
to pay the rent. The first thing he did was to write a 
letter to the editor of London Society, in which a few 
of his short stories had already appeared ("feeble echoes 
of Bret Harte" he later described them), explaining the 
situation, sending a new story for their next Christmas 
number, and begging for payment in advance. The editor sent £10, which settled the first quarter's rent, and 
Doyle was grateful. But when, after Doyle's reputation 
was made, the editor published all his juvenilia in a 
volume under his own name, he was not so grateful.

Following the visit of the gas company's man, business flagged. For three days the bell did not ring. Doyle 
sat in his bedroom counting the passers-by who took
notice of his plate. "Once (on a Sunday morning) there 
were over a hundred in an hour, and often I could see 
from their glancing over their shoulders as they walked 
on, that they were thinking or talking of the new doctor. 
This used to cheer me up, and make me feel that something was going on." He did his shopping between nine 
and ten at night, returning as a rule with a loaf of bread, 
some fried fish, or some saveloys. After dinner he quietly 
emerged from the house with a broom, and if anyone 
passed while he was busy he dropped the broom and 
gazed at the stars in a meditative manner. Later, when 
all respectable citizens were in bed, he brought out a rag, 
a tin of polishing paste and a chamois leather, and set to 
on his plate, which shone so brightly in the daytime 
that no one could help noticing it.

The first person to break the three-days' silence was 
the man he had fought on the evening of his arrival. He 
did not recognize Doyle, and as he had called to see 
whether the doctor had any scissors to grind, Doyle's 
interest in him was brief. The next person was his first 
bona fide patient: "a little anaemic old maid, a chronic 
hypochondriac, I should judge, who had probably 
worked her way round every doctor in the town, and 
was anxious to sample this novelty... She said that 
she would come again on Wednesday, but her eyes 
shifted as she said it. One and sixpence was as much as 
she could pay, but it was very welcome. I can live three 
days on one and sixpence." Which was true, because 
when he jotted down his daily expenditure on food he 
found that it came to about sixpence a day. His daily 
ration of tea, sugar, and Swiss milk worked out at a 
penny; his loaf of bread was twopence three farthings; 
whilst his dinner cost twopence if he had two saveloys 
or two pieces of fried fish or a quarter of an eightpenny 
tin of Chicago beef, and twopence halfpenny if he had 
a third of a pound of bacon. He gave up butter, as well
as tobacco, but the military doings in Egypt thrilled 
him and he could not resist the luxury of a halfpenny 
evening paper. One might suppose that such a diet would 
have toned down the vitality of so large a man, "but I 
never felt more fit in my life. So full of energy am I that
I start off sometimes at ten at night and walk hard until 
two or three in the morning. I dare not go out during 
the day, you see, for fear that I should miss a patient."

A few weeks after his arrival his little brother Innes 
came from Edinburgh to keep him company. Out of 
school hours Innes was helpful, blacking the boots, 
carrying medicine, opening the door, shopping, scrubbing, and so on; and he was very companionable, accompanying his big brother on long walking expeditions 
and taking almost as much interest in the imperial associations of Portsmouth and the news from Egypt. From 
a letter written by the lad to their mother in August '82 
it appears that business was looking up: "We have made 
three bob this week. We have vaxenated a baby and 
got hold of a man with consumtion." But sometimes it 
was the doctor who paid for the consultation. One 
morning a gipsy's van, covered with baskets and chairs, 
stopped outside the house, and the bell rang. Thinking 
that the owner wanted to sell him something, Doyle 
yelled from upstairs, "Go away!" The bell rang again, 
and Innes repeated the order through the letter-box. 
The gipsy swore volubly and said that he wanted the 
doctor to see his baby. Meanwhile, Doyle, not realizing 
that the conversation was being held through the letter-box, kept bawling, "Shut that door!" But the moment 
he heard that his professional services were required his 
manner changed from that of an outraged householder 
to that of a solicitous doctor and he descended to open 
the door. "Pray step in, madam," said he to the baby's 
mother. The entire family stepped in, and he discovered 
that the baby was in the early stages of measles. They
were so poor that the visit ended in his giving the medicine for nothing and adding all his small change, five-pence, to the gift. "A few more such patients," he thought, "and I am a broken man."

There were occasions in those early days when the 
inmates of Bush Villa (which was later to be called 
Doyle House) had to live on a crust of bread. Rather 
than break into those ten pounds, which he had set 
aside for the quarter-day's rent, Doyle would have 
starved. Sometimes he could not even afford a stamp for 
a letter home, and the position of affairs in Egypt had to 
be gleaned from the posters. Three times he had to pawn 
his watch, and it occurred to him that instead of paying 
a poor rate he ought to be collecting it. During the 
first six months he lost a stone in weight. The few 
patients were so poor that they could seldom afford more 
than eighteen pence, and throughout that time he was 
called upon to do nothing but listen "to the throb of the  
charwoman's heart and the rustle of the greengrocer's 
lungs." Had he been a little less honest he might have 
done better, for his uncle sent him a letter of introduction to the Catholic bishop, and there was no Catholic 
doctor in the town; but as he could no longer believe 
in that creed, he resisted the temptation and destroyed the letter.

After a while some luck came his way. He happened 
to be passing a grocer's shop when the owner fell down 
in a fit of epilepsy. "You may believe that I saw my 
chance, bustled in, treated the man, conciliated his wife, 
tickled the child, and gained over the whole household." 
The fits were periodical, and Doyle arranged to buy his 
food at the shop, balancing his account against the 
grocer's. "It was a ghoulish compact, by which a fit to 
him meant butter and bacon to me, while a spell of 
health for him sent me back to dry bread and saveloys."
At last the grocer died, and Doyle had to do without 
butter again. Then there were two small road accidents 
near his door, from which he derived little profit; but 
taking a leaf out of Budd's book he hurried off to the 
local newspaper, described the accident, and managed 
to get himself into the news: "The driver, though much 
shaken, is pronounced by Dr. Conan Doyle, of Bush 
Villa, to have suffered no serious injury." A more dangerous accident was more profitable. He was feeding 
in his back room when he heard a noise in the street, 
rushed to the door and met a crowd of folk carrying a 
lawyer who had fallen from his horse and been trampled 
on. "They flooded into my house, thronged my hall, 
dirtied my consulting-room, and even pushed their way 
into my back room, which they found elegantly furnished with a portmanteau, a lump of bread, and a cold 
sausage. However, I had no thought for anyone but my 
patient, who was groaning most dreadfully. I saw that 
his ribs were right, tested his joints, ran my hand down 
his limbs, and concluded that there was no break or 
dislocation. He had strained himself in such a way, however, that it was very painful for him to sit or to walk.
I sent for an open carriage, therefore, and conveyed him 
to his home, I sitting with my most professional air, and
he standing straight up between my hands. The carriage 
went at a walk, and the crowd trailed behind, with all 
the folk looking out of the windows, so that a more 
glorious advertisement could not be conceived. It looked 
like the advance guard of a circus. Once at his house, 
however, professional etiquette demanded that I should 
hand the case over to the family attendant, which I did 
with as good a grace as possible — not without some lingering hope that the old-established practitioner might 
say, 'You have taken such very good care of my patient, 
Dr. Doyle, that I should not dream of removing him
from your hands.' On the contrary, he snatched it away 
from me with avidity, and I retired with some credit, 
an excellent advertisement, and a guinea."

Doyle had a strong feeling that a doctor who opened 
his own door forfeited the confidence of his patients, 
and one morning early in '83 he had a brain-wave. Business was improving; now and again he was able to 
indulge in a pipe; and the milkman was calling daily, 
"which gives you a great sense of swagger when you 
have not been used to it." He therefore paid a shilling 
for three insertions of the following advertisement in 
the evening paper: "To Let. A basement floor, in exchange for services. Apply Bush Villa." One insertion 
would have been enough: he was deluged with applicants. "I should have been prepared at the outset to take 
anything in a petticoat; but as we saw the demand increase, our conditions went up and up: white aprons, 
proper dress for answering door, doing beds and boots, 
cooking — we became more and more exacting. So at last 
we made our selection... She was a hard-faced, 
brusque-mannered person, whose appearance in a bachelor's household was not likely to cause a scandal. Her 
nose was in itself a certificate of virtue. She was to bring 
her furniture into the basement, and I was to give her 
and her sister one of the two upper rooms for a bedroom." All went well at first, but coming down earlier 
than usual one morning Doyle saw a small bearded man 
who was just about to leave by the front door. An explanation of his presence being demanded, he said that 
he was married to the woman whom Doyle had engaged. 
"Dreadful doubts of my housekeeper flashed across my 
mind, but I thought of her nose and was reassured. An 
examination revealed everything. She was a married 
woman. The lines were solemnly produced. Her husband 
was a seaman. She had passed as a miss, because she 
thought I was more likely to take a housekeeper without encumbrances. Her husband had come home unexpectedly from a long voyage, and had returned last night. And then — plot within plot — the other woman was not her sister, but a friend... She thought I was more likely to take two sisters than two friends. So we all came to know who the other was."

He allowed the seaman to remain, and allotted the 
other bedroom on the top floor to his wife's friend. It 
seemed to Doyle that, from absolute solitude, he was 
"rapidly developing into the keeper of a casual ward." 
In return for the lodging he made the seaman clean the 
place twice a week "until the boards were like a quarterdeck."

Finding a few shillings in his pocket at about this 
time, and having no immediate expenses to meet, Doyle 
purchased a four-and-a-half gallon cask of beer and 
placed it in the cellar, firmly determined that it shouldn
not be touched except on special occasions or when a 
guest had to be entertained. His male lodger went to 
sea again in three weeks, and the sound of quarreling 
came up from the basement. Soon the unmarried woman 
tearfully explained that the other made life impossible, a
and announced her intention of leaving and of setting 
up a small shop. Doyle having expressed his regret, she 
suddenly said, "Take a drink of your own beer," and 
left hurriedly. Doyle dived into the cellar, found his 
beer-cask empty, and after an unpleasant scene with the 
seaman's wife gave her notice to leave on the spot. "But 
we were demoralized by luxury. We could no longer 
manage without a helper — especially now in the winter-time, when fires had to be lit — the most heart-breaking 
task that a man can undertake." So he went in search of 
the woman who had left the house after warning him 
about the beer. "She was quite willing to come, and saw 
how she could get out of the rent; but the difficulty lay
with her stock. This sounded formidable at first, but
when I came to learn that the whole thing had cost 
eleven shillings, it did not appear insurmountable. In half 
an hour my watch was pawned, and the affair concluded. I returned with an excellent housekeeper, and 
with a larger basketful of inferior Swedish matches, 
bootlaces, cakes of black lead, and little figures made of 
sugar, than I should have thought it possible to get for 
the money."

He decided to pay her a small, a very small, salary; 
and from that moment life at Bush Villa was more comfortable. She became an admirable housekeeper, and 
nursed his practice by pretending to every caller that he 
was in great demand. "Dear me, now!" she would say; 
"he's been hurried off again. If you'd been here half an 
hour ago he might have given you a minute." Or, consulting an imaginary list, she would do her best to fit 
someone in: "Let us see! He will be clear at seven 
minutes past eight this evening. Yes, he could just manage it then. He has no one at all from seven past to the 
quarter past." If the patient, who arrived at the minute 
named, could have realized that he was the first to be 
seen that day, which had probably been spent by the 
doctor at cricket, he might not have been so punctual, 
nor valued so highly the advice he received.

Gradually the practice increased, not because of 
Doyle's ability as a doctor but because of his adaptability as a man. He at length came to the conclusion 
that it was no good waiting in for patients: one might 
sit on one's chair until it broke without making the least 
progress. So he determined to go out and fetch them in. 
That is, he began to take part in the social activities of 
the place. He joined a football club, a bowling club, a 
political club, a literary club, and several cricket clubs. 
He mixed with as many men as possible in as many 
walks of life as possible; and although he might have 
missed a patient or two by attending a smoking concert,
he soon discovered that the loss was more than balanced 
by the fact that he had passed a noisy evening with 
eighty potential patients. But he was very careful to keep 
his own boisterousness within limits; he did not forget 
why he was there; he was friendly, genial, convivial, but 
he never drank a drop too much, never lost the respect 
which he felt was his due as a doctor, knowing well 
that, while the rest of the company condoned drunkenness in one another, they would not overlook it in the 
man to whom they might commit their lives.

In all these activities Doyle was, as always, very 
thorough. Whatever he took up was carried through 
with every scrap of energy and conviction he possessed. 
He played games for all he was worth, and soon found 
himself on the club committees, with requests to act as 
secretary or chairman. He lectured to literary gatherings, 
and was accepted as an authority. He debated at political 
meetings, and was soon in demand as a speaker; though 
in his early days he was so nervous that the bench he was 
sitting on, as well as everyone else who sat upon it, 
shook with his emotion for a minute or two before he 
got on his legs. Meanwhile he kept himself to the fore 
as a doctor by writing to the newspapers in support of 
vivisection or criticizing the anti-vaccinationists. His 
popularity was partly gained by his performances in the 
field of sport. He was a very good all-round cricketer 
and became captain of the Portsmouth Cricket Club. As 
a footballer he was described as "one of the safest Association backs in Hampshire"; while his billiards and 
bowls were well above the average. He was further 
helped by the catholicity of his interests, for he became 
joint secretary of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific 
Society, to which he read papers on Gibbon and Carlyle, 
and vice-president of the Liberal-Unionist Association. 
He seemed indeed to take an interest in everything, from 
the battles in Egypt, descriptions of which he pasted
into a scrapbook, to the mystery of Edwin Drood, of 
which he wrote his own solution; from vaccination, 
which he thought should be made compulsory, to verse, 
wherein he exercised himself by writing a mock heroic 
poem on a football match between the ancient gods and 
heroes.

Apart from the number of male patients he collected 
by these means, it seems that his manner fascinated old 
ladies. We have record of two fairly tough cases. One 
was Mrs. Mary Harriet Abbott of Garden Terrace, 
Southsea, who at the age of ioi suffered a fall and injured herself, but she was attended by Dr. Conan Doyle, 
"whose services," according to the local paper, "resulted 
in her complete recovery." Six weeks after her accident 
she sallied forth to enjoy a Turkish bath, after which 
she returned home in a cutting east wind, which brought 
on congestion of the lungs. This was too much for 
Doyle, and even too much for Mrs. Abbott. The second 
old lady was tall, haughty, dignified, and horse-faced. 
She lived in a small house, and was attended by a small 
servant. Passers-by used to admire her picturesque poise 
as she sat framed in her window, looking like an aristocrat of the ancien regime. But once every two months or 
so she indulged in a drinking bout, which lasted about a 
week, and the admiration of the passers-by changed to 
consternation as she skimmed plates at them through 
the window, varying the sport by shouting, singing, and 
chasing her servant about the house with derisive yells. 
Doyle was called in during one of her field-days, soon 
discovered how to control her, and thenceforth was 
fetched whenever the plates began to soar through the 
window. Once she spotted him coming in at the gate 
and was about to receive him with crockery when she 
caught the look in his eye and forbore. She had a collection of curios, jugs, statues, pictures, and so forth, many 
of which she loaded him with on these occasions, begging him to accept them as a mark of her appreciation, 
and he used to "stagger out of the house like one of 
Napoleon's generals coming out of Italy." But with the 
return of sanity she always despatched a porter with a 
polite note asking for their return. "Once when she had 
been particularly troublesome," he wrote many years 
later, "I retained a fine lava jug, in spite of her protests,
and I have got it yet."

Doyle's practice never became large. He made £154 
the first year, £250 the second, and then by degrees his 
income rose to £300, where it stayed: he never earned 
more as a doctor in any one year while he was at Southsea from 1882 to 1890. When he filled in and sent off his 
first income tax form, it was returned with the comment: 
"Most unsatisfactory." He wrote "I entirely agree" 
underneath and posted it back again. Whereupon he was 
ordered to appear in person. An inspection of his ledger 
stumped the officials, and they parted on cordial terms.

Though he made little money as a doctor, his practice 
brought him a wife. He was taken into consultation over 
a youth who suffered from cerebral meningitis. The 
boy's mother, a widow named Mrs. Hawkins, had come 
from Gloucestershire to settle in Southsea, and there was 
also a daughter, Louise, "a very gentle and amiable girl." 
As the lad required constant attention, and their lodgings 
were unsatisfactory, Mrs. Hawkins and her daughter 
called to ask Doyle whether he could recommend a doctor who would take him in as a patient. Doyle considered the matter carefully, and then rang for his house-keeper. "Do you think we can furnish a bedroom by tonight, so as to take in a gentleman who is ill?" he asked. The housekeeper was equal to the occasion. "Easily, sir, 
if the patients will only let me alone. But with that bell 
going thirty times an hour, it's hard to say what you're 
going to do." The room was furnished by the evening, 
and the boy moved in. Doyle was now assured of one
regular patient, and felt rather ashamed of the gratitude  
expressed by Mrs. Hawkins and her daughter. But the 
boy only lived for a few days, and Doyle was caused a 
good deal of anxiety because the death had occurred in 
his house; in fact he would have been very awkwardly 
placed if he had not asked the doctor who had taken him 
into consultation over the case to see the patient the day 
before he died. Also a funeral from a doctor's house is 
not the sort of advertisement for which he craves. However, the affair ended happily, because a friendship commenced between himself and the family of Hawkins, and very soon he was engaged to Louise.

In 1885 his brother Innes left him to enter a public 
school in Yorkshire, and in the same year he married. 
His income at the time was about £270, but as his wife 
had a hundred or so of her own they were able to enjoy 
"the decencies, if not the luxuries, of life."


=== 5. While Waiting ===

Odd stories, some of them very odd, had been written
by Doyle between 1878 and 1883, and a few had been
accepted by the editors of magazines that appealed to
boys and elderly boys. Three or four guineas was the
average payment for one of these, and they never yielded
more than £15 a year. In 1883 he got into what he called
good company, and experienced his first thrill of recognition
when James Payn accepted his tale "Habakuk
Jephson's Statement" for the Cornhill, paying him
twenty-nine guineas for it. The contributions were anonymous,
but Doyle was too elated over the appearance of
his work in a magazine that had been founded and
edited by Thackeray to keep the news to himself, and
he experienced a thrill of another sort when a friend ran
after him in the street, waving a London evening paper
and shouting, "Have you seen what they say about your
Cornhill story?"

"No, no. What is it?"

"Here it is! Here it is!"

Trembling with excitement, swelling with pride, but
making a desperate attempt to appear modest, Doyle
peeped over his friend's shoulder and began to read, 
"This month's Cornhill opens with a story which will 
make Thackeray turn in his grave..." When relating 
the incident long afterward Doyle added, "There were 
several witnesses about, and the Portsmouth bench are 
severe upon assaults, so my friend escaped unscathed." 
He was comforted when another critic said that his yarn 
might have been written by R. L. Stevenson.

After that he sent all his stories to James Payn, who 
was compelled to return five out of six. Unfortunately 
Payn's writing was almost wholly illegible, and between 
the reception of his letter and the return of the MS. 
Doyle suffered agonies of uncertainty as to whether his 
work had found favor or not. Two more of his tales 
appeared in the Cornhill, and Blackwood's took another. 
But he was still utterly unknown, and feeling it was 
necessary that his name should appear on the back of a 
volume he wrote a novel which he entitled The Narrative of John Smith. Unfortunately it was lost in the post 
on its first journey to a publisher; and although Doyle 
was to confess in after years that "my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were 
suddenly to appear again — in print," his biographer feels 
differently about it. The title alone assures us of its 
autobiographical nature, and as the author said that it 
was "of a personal-social-political complexion," and that 
it steered "periously near to the libellous," we cannot 
share his later thankfulness that the countless blue forms  
sent him by the Post Office were filled up in vain.

The shock of its loss did not paralyze him, and in 1884 
he commenced another novel: The Firm of Girdlestone. 
In this, the first of his novels to survive, though it was  
not published until he had made his name with stories of 
a very different brand, his peculiar merits and faults as a 
writer are at once apparent. All the "action" episodes are  
first-rate, and we are given a good specimen of the
humorous observation that was later to make his best 
short stories so entertaining: "Their faces wearing that 
pained and anxious expression which the British countenance naturally assumes when dancing, giving the impression that the legs have suddenly burst forth in a 
festive mood, and have dragged the rest of the body into 
it very much against its will." On the other hand the book 
is padded out with descriptions of a dozen things that 
have nothing to do with the story. There is a lot of information about Edinburgh University; there are descriptions of a rectorial election, of a "rugger" match between 
England and Scotland, and of a first professional examination; with the result that the reader may sometimes 
wonder whether he is reading a guide-book for undergrads or a "thriller." Doyle had obviously been wallowing in Dickens, for he apostrophizes one of his characters 
thus: "Perhaps, Thomas Gilroy, that ill-spared half-crown of yours may bring in better interest than the 
five-and-twenty pounds of your employer." And he 
dismisses his characters at the end of the novel in this 
style: "I see them going on down the vista of the future, 
gathering wisdom and happiness as they go... I see 
Kate and her husband, chastened by their many troubles, 
and making the road to the grave pleasant to the good 
old couple who are so proud of their son..." Finally, 
we are made aware of the essential simplicity of the 
author, whose hero has only told one lie in his life and 
that a noble one, and whose villains, portrayed as 
shrewd business men, place themselves open-eyed at 
the mercy of blackmailing blackguards without taking 
any precautions: they even employ one of these rascals, 
who has already tried to ruin them, to murder a girl 
whose money they will get at her death. Their creator 
had a trusting nature.

The patchwork effect of the book is partly due to the conditions in which it was written. Doyle's practice between '84 and '86, though poor, was busy, and there were constant interruptions. In the middle of a chapter this sort of thing would occur:

Enter his housekeeper.

"Mrs. Thurston's little boy wants to see you, doctor." 

"Show him in," says Doyle, trying to fix in his memory the scene he has been planning.

"Well, my boy?"

"Please, doctor, mother wants to know if she is to add water to that medicine?"

"Certainly, certainly."

It pays doctors to be decisive. The boy goes, and Doyle continues his novel. The boy returns hurriedly.

"Please, doctor, when I got back mother had taken the medicine without the water."

"Tut, tut! It really does not matter in the least."

The boy looks suspiciously at the doctor as he leaves the room, and Doyle adds a paragraph to his chapter. 

Suddenly the husband arrives.

"There seems to have been some misunderstanding about that medicine," he says frigidly.

"Not at all: it really didn't matter."

"Then why did you tell the boy that it should be taken with water?"

Doyle tries to explain but fails to convince the husband, who shakes his head gloomily and says, "She feels very queer. We should all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at her."

So Doyle has to abandon his heroine at a crucial moment in her fortunes and concern himself with pills and pulses.

No publisher would consider Girdlestone, and its regular reappearance at Bush Villa depressed the author but did not surprise him.

Meanwhile he never stopped reading because he 
thought it "a great mistake to start putting out cargo
when you have hardly stowed any on board." He was 
much attracted by the plots of Gaboriau's tales and he 
absorbed a deal of detective fiction. Poe's Dupin had 
always been a favorite of his, and it occurred to him 
that he could humanize some such character by modeling it on Dr. Bell, whose deductive faculty had so much 
impressed him at Edinburgh University. We shall learn 
more of this in the next chapter. Sufficient here to say 
that Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in A 
Study in Scarlet, which Doyle wrote in 1886. Realizing 
its merit he was deeply disappointed when this story 
began to repeat the monotonous journeys to and from 
the publishers which Girdlestone had made. At last the 
firm of Ward, Lock & Co. offered £25 for the copyright, if the author did not "object to its being held overt
till next year." The author objected not only to the 
delay but to the offer, and wrote to ask for a percentage 
on sales. The firm replied on November 2nd, 1886:

"DEAR SIR,

"In reply to your letter of yesterday's date we regret 
to say that we shall be unable to allow you to retain a 
percentage on the sale of your work as it might give rise  
to some confusion. The tale may have to be inserted together with some other in one of our annuals, therefore we must adhere to our original offer of £25 for the complete copyright.

"We are, dear Sir,<br />
"Yours truly,<br />
"WARD, LOCK & co."

Doyle never made a penny more than £25 out of A 
Study in Scarlet, which first appeared in "Beeton's Xmas 
Annual" in 1887. While waiting for it to be published, he 
decided to spread himself on a historical theme, or, as he 
put it, "feeling large thoughts rise within me, I now 
determined to test my powers to the full." The toughness, not the teachings, of the Puritans had always appealed to him, and with Macaulay as his main inspiration he did about a year's reading and five months' writing before producing Micah Clarke, which was finished early in '88. By that time his Holmes book was 
out, but the favorable notice it had received did not help 
Micah Clarke, which went the usual round of publishers and returned in the usual way. Blackwood's informed him that "many of your characters, for instance, strike us as belonging more to the 19th than to the 17th century," but the reason why no magazine would touch 
it was given by the Globe Newspaper Syndicate, to 
which he had sent it with the suggestion that it might appeal to the readers of one of their papers, The People. The manager's department replied on August 31st, 1888, to Dr. A. Corran Boyle, Bush Villa, Southsea:

"DEAR SIR,

"The gentleman who reads our Tales for us has carefully perused your Micah Clarke, and, whilst fully admitting that it is written well, and has much interest of a kind, is not from the nature of its subject or its style suitable for the serial publication in a popular newspaper like The People.

"I may just mention that one great failure in it is the fact that it has next to no attraction for female readers who form undoubtedly a large percentage of our subscribers. Again it is hardly sensational enough.

"I thank you for the offer, and am sorry that we cannot make use of the MS.

"How and where shall we send it?

"Yours faithfully,''  

"..."

After reading this letter, which he pasted into his 
scrapbook, "Dr. Corran Boyle" understood why the style 
and theme of his book would not appeal to the readers of 
The People, to say nothing of The Globe. But the constant refusals worried him. "I remember smoking over 
my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff
of country air after one of its descents upon town, and 
wondering what I should do if some sporting, reckless 
kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and make 
me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot." As a last 
hope he sent it to Longmans, and by a stroke of good 
luck it fell into the hands of Andrew Lang, who advised 
the firm to publish it. Of the period before it came out in
February '89 Doyle was able to say that "during ten 
years of hard work, I averaged less than £50 a year from 
my pen." But success was now on the way. A Study in 
Scarlet had been generously pirated and handsomely reviewed in the United States, and when the firm of Lippincott sent over a representative to commission a few 
books by British authors James Payn wrote to Doyle: 
"I recommended you to Lippincott the other day, I 
hope with success. I am ill so excuse brevity." Doyle was 
invited to dinner, took a day off, and found that his 
fellow guests were also Irish: a Member of Parliament 
named Gill, and Oscar Wilde. "It was a golden evening 
for me," he recorded. "Wilde to my surprise had read 
Micah Clarke and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did 
not feel a complete outsider. His conversation left an 
indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us 
all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in allt
that we could say." As a result of that dinner Wilde 
wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray for Lippincott's and 
Doyle The Sign of Four, in which Sherlock Holmes 
made his second appearance.

The welcome given to Micah Clarke by the critics 
had stimulated Doyle, and he spent close on two years 
over his next historical romance, The White Company, 
having read well over a hundred volumes on the period, 
French and English, before starting to work. He considered the reign of Edward III "the greatest epoch in 
English history," giving the whimsical reason that "both 
the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in
London." Such a view, curious in a writer, is natural in 
a soldier, and it explains why Doyle, a born man of 
action, was always at his best in describing action, and 
why he was so gravely concerned with accuracy in the 
historic background to his romances. He believed Charles 
Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth to be the greatest 
novel in the English language, mainly because the author 
takes the reader by the hand and leads him through the 
Middle Ages, "and not a conventional study-built Middle 
Age, but a period quivering with life, full of folk who 
are as human and real as a bus-load in Oxford Street. He 
takes him through Holland, he shows him the painters, 
the dykes, the life. He leads him down the long line of 
the Rhine, the spinal marrow of medieval Europe. He 
shows him the dawn of printing, the beginnings of freedom, the life of the great mercantile cities of South Germany, the state of Italy, the artist-life of Rome, the monastic institutions on the eve of the Reformation..."

As we know, Conan Doyle was immensely impressed 
by the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay, and here again 
we note his love of information for its own sake. True, 
he paid a tribute to the imaginative quality in Reade's 
book, but one feels that for him The Cloister and the 
Hearth was primarily a great encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, a super-Baedeker. That is the chief fault of 
his own romances. He steeped himself in his subject but 
could not imaginatively transmute it; and in his serious 
novels he was being either painfully historical or joyfully 
romantic, and he failed to fuse the two main elements. 
"I am fairly tied to the chariot-wheels of history now," 
says Micah Clarke, which indeed was Doyle's trouble 
whenever he set out to reproduce a period. To the end 
of his life it never occurred to him that the accumulation 
of detail, however accurate or picturesque, does not 
vivify an age but nullifies it. Here, for example, is a
passage from his last industrious attempt to recapture the 
past in Sir Nigel:

"The great influx of foreign knights who had come in 
their splendor from all parts of Christendom to take part 
in the opening of the Round Tower of Windsor six years 
before, and to try their luck and their skill at the tournament connected with it, had deeply modified the English 
fashions of dress. The old tunic, over-tunic, and cyclas 
were too sad and simple for the new fashions, so now 
strange and brilliant cote-hardier, pourpoints, courtepies, 
paltocks, hanselines, and many other wondrous garments, 
parti-coloured, or diapered, with looped, embroidered or 
escalloped edges, flamed and glittered round the king. He 
himself, in black velvet and gold, formed a dark right 
centre to the finery around him."

He picked up this trick from Sir Walter Scott, in whose 
historical productions the scenery and properties are 
sometimes as important as the story and characters. The 
passage reads like a series of stage-directions: it is the 
work of a pageant-producer, not a poet. But whenever 
Doyle forgot the notes he had taken from the books he 
had read on the period with which he was dealing, and 
let himself rip, no one but Dumas could write more 
stirring scenes of action. Then the martial man seized 
the pen, and the book came to life; only to die again 
when the soldier in him, who had such a profound respect for the scholar, recalled his period and handed back the pen to the fellow who had so laboriously studied it.

Doyle had a high opinion of his historical novels. 
Towards the close of his life, he declared that, taken 
together, The White Company and Sir Nigel "did 
thoroughly achieve my purpose, that they made an accurate picture of that great age, and that as a single piece 
of work they form the most complete, satisfying and 
ambitious thing that I have ever done." As a consequence 
he underestimated the stories he wrote with ease. Nowadays we can see that the facile saga of Sherlock Holmes 
is far more valuable even as a "period piece" than the 
diligent epic of Edward the Third. The work that comes 
spontaneously from a man, the work he considers beneath his best, is often the work that survives, the classic example being the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

When he wrote the last words of The White Company, Doyle felt "a wave of exultation, and with a cry 
of 'That's done it!' I hurled my inky pen across the 
room, where it left a black smudge upon the duck's-egg 
wall-paper. I knew in my heart that the book would live 
and that it would illuminate our national traditions." It 
certainly became popular and established his reputation 
as a "serious" writer, largely because of its appeal to an 
age that longed to escape from the stuffiness of commerce into the invigorating atmosphere of chivalry, an 
age that had forgotten the reality of war and so idealized 
it. Doyle was the mouthpiece of his age, expressing its 
vague aspirations more completely and wholeheartedly 
than any other writer of his time. He was "the average 
man" made articulate. Lacon Watson, in his Lectures to 
Living Authors, says that Doyle achieved his position by 
sheer hard work, that he was the novelist of the average 
male Briton, and that his opinions harmonized with those 
of the majority. We need seek no further for the explanation of his success.

The age was not only bursting for bloodshed but 
thirsting for mystery — yearning for anything that would 
temporarily release it from the stifling air of merchandise and respectability — and while Doyle was waiting for 
his patients between 1885 and 1890 he wrote a number 
of short stories in addition to his long romances. Most of 
these eventually appeared in The Captain of the Polestar, 
but two of them reveal another side of his nature, which 
represented a similar urge in the ordinary man.

Like all spiritually undeveloped folk, Doyle was
greatly attracted to such subjects as telepathy, theosophy, 
hypnotism, and anything else that went beyond the 
borderland of normal experience; and during his Southsea days he passed through various esoteric phases, starting with telepathy and hypnotism, continuing with occultism and Buddhism, and ending up with table-turning and spiritualism. Of the last we shall hear more later on; but his telepathic and theosophic phase resulted in two 
stories, neither of which appeared in book form until the 
middle 'nineties. The first he called The Parasite. It is a 
powerful little yarn, with perhaps more than a tinge of 
autobiography in it, about a doctor who does not believe 
that the spirit is something apart from the body and is 
converted by a lame and unattractive female mesmerist, 
who falls passionately in love with him and forces him to 
behave in a manner he regards as infamous and criminal 
while under the spell of her power. One day, when he is 
with her, she faints: he promptly regains control of himself in her presence, and when she comes round tells her 
exactly what he thinks of her. As it is extremely uncomplimentary her passion turns to hate, and recovering her 
strength she uses her telepathic power to make him talk 
nonsense at his lectures. To anyone who has listened to 
professorial lectures the effect of this is extraordinary: 
he is suspended from his chair by the authorities of the 
university. Having shown what she can do with him, she 
asks whether he wishes to retract the words he addressed 
to her while out of her power. He refuses, and she determines to ruin him socially. Under the trance into which 
she sends him he tries to break into a bank. Finally she 
compels him to take a bottle of vitriol to the house of the 
girl to whom he is engaged in order to disfigure her. 
While waiting for the girl in her room he emerges from 
the trance, realizes what has happened, and rushes round 
to the mesmerist with the intention of killing her. On 
arrival he is told that she died at 3:30 — the precise moment at which he had come to himself in his fiancee's room with the bottle of vitriol ready for action.

Doyle then moved on to Buddhism, and showed what 
its devotees could do in The Mystery of Cloomber. The 
scientist, says he, should "look to the East, from which 
all great movements come," where the savants "are many 
thousand years ahead of him in all the essentials of 
knowledge"; and he concludes that "the occult philosophy has been the work of the very cream of humanity." 
After reading the novel some readers would prefer a 
philosophy that comes from the very beer of humanity. 
Briefly, an English officer, in the course of his duty in 
the East, kills a Buddhist holy man. From that moment 
he is doomed, and spends the rest of his life fleeing and 
hiding from the other holy men who are on his track 
and who at intervals convey to him by signals that he 
cannot escape his fate. At last they come for him in a 
boat which is conveniently wrecked on the lonely bit of 
Scottish coast where he has fortified himself in a large 
house, the implication being that Buddhist holy men can 
create a storm at sea as easy as winking. He makes no resistance, follows them obediently, and comes to a sticky 
end in a bog. The chronicler is not in a position to inform 
us whether the soldier's last regrets were that he had 
failed to make a clean sweep of holy men while serving 
in the East.

Doyle was always hankering after a life of action, and 
though he could not join the army in Egypt he managed 
to get in touch with the army at home when there was 
a call for doctors to do the work of those in the Medical 
Service who were serving on the Nile. Most of the civilian doctors who volunteered made certain stipulations, 
and when Doyle appeared before the Board of Selection 
he was bawled at by the President: "And you, sir! What 
are you prepared to do?" "Anything," said Doyle, and 
promptly got the job.

What with cricket, literature, his practice, his marriage, and the birth of a daughter, life was flowing along 
pleasantly enough in 1890, and at a later date he wrote: 
"As I have never had personal ambitions, since the simple 
things of life have always been the most pleasant to me, 
it is possible that I should have remained in Southsea permanently but for this new episode in my life." The new 
episode resulted from an announcement by a German 
doctor named Koch that he would demonstrate his discovery of a cure for consumption. For no apparent reason, since he took little interest in such matters and was skeptical about cures for anything, Doyle felt "a great urge" and "an irresistible impulse" to visit Berlin and witness the demonstration. The probability is that, without 
knowing it, he wanted to get away from Southsea, an 
unconscious ambition being responsible for the urge and 
the impulse. No doubt domesticity was extremely pleasant, but as a rule men of action enjoy the prospect of it 
more than the experience. He acted immediately on the 
impulse and arrived in Berlin with letters of introduction 
to the British Ambassador and the correspondent of The 
Times, collected en route from W. T. Stead, who asked 
him to do a character-study of Koch for The Review of 
Reviews. The Ambassador would not help him; the 
Times correspondent was unable to help him; Koch refused to see him; Bergmann the demonstrator was rude 
to him; and if it had not been for a good-natured American, who made full notes of the lecture and allowed him 
to study them the following morning along with the 
cases that were exhibited, his journey to Berlin would 
have been wasted. He came to the conclusion that "the 
whole thing was experimental and premature," wrote 
a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying so, and was justified by the event.

In the train to Berlin he had passed most of the night 
talking with a Harley Street skin specialist named Malcolm Morris, who told him that he was wasting his 
time in the provinces, and, finding that he was interested in eye work, advised him to set up in London as 
an eye specialist after six months' study in Vienna. 
"Thus," said Morris, "you will have a nice clean life 
with plenty of leisure for your literature." Doyle returned to Southsea "a changed man," Morris's suggestion buzzing in his head. Mrs. Doyle favored the move, 
and after arranging for their little daughter to stay with 
her grandmother they began to pack up. "There were 
no difficulties about disposing of the practice, for it was 
so small and so purely personal that it could not be sold 
to another and simply had to dissolve." On December 
12th, 1890, Doyle was given a Farewell Dinner at the 
Grosvenor Hotel by the members of the Portsmouth 
Literary and Scientific Society, and a few days later he 
bade farewell to Bush Villa, recalling the thrill with 
which he had entered it eight and a half years before, 
and thrilling once more with a sense of freedom and adventure as he left it for fresh bricks and mortar new.

They reached Vienna on Monday night, January 5th, 
1891. It was bitterly cold, with a blizzard, and Doyle 
felt that his career as an eye specialist was starting inauspiciously, a feeling that deepened when he attended the 
lectures, which he could have followed more easily if he 
had previously familiarized himself with the German 
names for all the technical terms. He began to keep a 
diary in January '91 and continued to do so for about 
twenty years; but as the entries were unusually laconic, 
and in later years were almost exclusively concerned with 
cash receipts and cricket results, we can learn little 
from them, though we shall find the diary for 1891, his 
annus mirabilis, illuminating. The entry for January 6th, 
the day after his arrival at Vienna, runs: "Began 'Raffles Haw,' " after which there is no entry until January 
23rd, when we read "Finished 'Raffles Haw.' " Turning
over a few empty pages we then come across, under 
February 3rd, "Raffles Haw £150." It was like Doyle to 
sit down and begin a story the moment he reached 
Vienna in order to pay the expenses of the trip. The 
story he wrote is the feeblest he ever wrote. The Doings 
of Raffles Haw is about a chemist who, having discovered how to transmute other metals to gold, becomes a 
billionaire. But he has a moral mission; he wishes to do 
good; so he helps the needy. The net result is that he 
turns hard-working men into loafers, breeds universal 
discontent, makes an enthusiastic artist a lazy good-for-nothing, breaks a love-match, sends a man mad, and generally speaking corrupts the community. At the conclusion of the parable one suspects that Doyle chose the theme in order to display his knowledge of chemistry.

In his autobiography Doyle says that he and his wife 
spent four very pleasant months at Vienna, enjoying 
some gay society and excellent skating; but his diary 
tells a different story. From it we learn that he stayed 
no more than two months at Vienna, instead of the six 
he had been advised to put in there; so we may conclude that the lectures were almost wholly unintelligible, 
and that after eight weeks of skating and gay life his 
conscience pricked him. Here are the tell-tale entries:

March 9th. Started for Semmering.<br />
March 10th. For Venice.<br />
March 16th. For Milan.<br />
March 19th. Reached Paris.<br />
March 24th. Reached London.

The White Company was running serially in the 
Cornhill when he arrived in London, which gave him 
confidence, but he still believed that medicine meant 
money; and after taking rooms in Montagu Place for 
his family and himself, he looked round for a spot in the  
Harley Street neighborhood where he could put up a
plate and earn a living as an oculist. At length he found 
what he wanted at the top of Wimpole Street. For the 
sum of £120 a year he obtained the sole use of a frontroom and part use of a waiting-room at No. 2 Devonshire 
Place, noting in his diary under Monday, April 6th: 
"Got Consulting Room in Order." But only three days 
before, on Friday the 3rd, he had made an entry which 
opened a strange epoch in the history of fiction:

"Sent 'A Scandal in Bohemia' to A. P. Watt."


=== 6. Sherlock Holmes ===

The writer whose fictional characters were better known 
to the average Englishman than any others outside the 
plays of Shakespeare had lived for a time in Devonshire 
Terrace; and it was fitting that the first tales in which 
Sherlock Holmes achieved world-notoriety should have 
come from much the same address, for Holmes was to 
surpass in fame even the best known of Dickens's characters. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that if Dickens 
had written the Holmes stories he would have made every 
character as vivid as Holmes. We may reply that if 
Dickens had done so he would have ruined the stories, 
which depend for their effect on the radiance of the 
central character and the relative glimmer of the satellites. True, Watson's glimmer amounts to genius, but it 
adds to the splendor of Holmes, and Dickens would 
have made a fearful mess of Watson.

At the present time there are only three other creations in English literature to compare with Holmes in 
the mind and mouth of the man in the street. Any coal-heaver, docker, charwoman, or publican would recognize 
what was meant on hearing someone described as "a reg'lar Romeo" or "a blasted Shylock" or "a blinkin' Robinson Crusoe" or "a bleedin' Sherlock Holmes." Other 
characters, such as Quixote, Bill Sikes, Mrs. Grundy, 
Micawber, Hamlet, Mrs. Gamp, Scrooge, the Artful 
Dodger, and so on, are known to the literate and the 
semi-literate; but those four are known to over ninety 
per cent of the population, to millions who have never 
read a line of the works in which they appear; the reason being that each of them is a symbolical figure, representing a permanent passion in human nature. Romeo 
stands for love, Shylock for avarice, Crusoe for adventure, and Holmes for sport. Few readers think of Holmes 
as a sportsman, but that is how he figures in the popular 
imagination: he is a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bulldog, who runs 
people to earth as the foxhound does the fox; in fact, a 
sleuth. He is the modern Galahad, no longer in quest 
of the Holy Grail, but hot on the scent of the bloody 
trail, a figure from folklore with the lineaments of real 
life. The curious thing about him is that, while not a 
four-square creation like all the greatest characters in 
literature, it is impossible not to believe in his existence. 
Wholly lacking the mystery and suggestiveness of a 
great portrait, he is as vivid as a snapshot. One knows 
how he would look and what he would say in certain 
given circumstances; indeed we all ape his look and say 
his words, given the circumstances. More than any character in fiction he stimulates the sense of association. For 
those of us who did not live in it, the London of the 
eighties and nineties of last century is simply the London 
of Holmes, and we cannot pass down Baker Street without thinking of him and trying to locate his lodgings. Of 
whom but Holmes has a literature sprung up solely concerned with the question of where he lived? One topographer, Mr. Ernest Short, has gone into the matter with 
a zeal worthy of no better cause and has shown by
diagrams and description that the present number 109 
was probably the residence of Sherlock Holmes, whose 
Christian name has been given to a mews at the rear of 
the opposite houses. Further, Holmes is the only fictional 
character who has been honored by a biography, his Life having been written by Mr. Vincent Starrett; and several societies, such as the Baker Street Irregulars and the Speckled Band Club, have been established to his glory in America.

Doyle himself was singularly unobservant: he gave 
the lodgings a bow-window; and the distinguishing feature of Baker Street is that there is not a bow-window 
from one end of it to the other. Doyle made dozens of 
such slips. In going through the stories recently I jotted 
down a few of them: (1) In "The Yellow Face" we are 
told that even when Holmes erred the truth was still 
discovered, as in the affair of the second stain. But in 
the story of "The Second Stain" it is Holmes who discovers the truth. (2) Colonel Sebastian Moran is, we presume, executed for murder in 1894; but Holmes says he is still living in 1902. (3) Holmes disappears on May 4th, 1891, and returns on March 31st, 1894; yet the adventure of "Wisteria Lodge" occurs in March 1892, 
when Holmes must have been traveling incognito in 
Tibet and was thought to be dead by Dr. Watson and 
the rest of the world. The fact is that it never dawned on 
Doyle that he was creating an immortal character; he 
was far more careful when relating the history of Nigel 
Loring, compared with whose exploits he described 
those of Holmes as "a lower stratum of literary achievement." Many years later he wrote in his diary that he 
had been re-reading the plays of Shakespeare and had 
been much struck by his many blunders. We pay the 
same tribute to Doyle whenever we re-read the adventures of Holmes. No one cares a rap for the improbabilities and contradictions in a character that gives so much delight. Like Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes is what every man desires to be; like Don Quixote, he is a 
knight-errant who rescues the unfortunate and fights 
single-handed against the powers of darkness; and like 
Quixote he has a Sancho Panza in the person of Dr. Watson.

There were living models for both Holmes and 
Watson. Doyle always declared that Dr. Joseph Bell, 
surgeon at the Edinburgh Infirmary, was the model for 
Sherlock Holmes, but Bell once confessed that Doyle 
owed "much less than he thinks to me." What happened, obviously, was that Bell stimulated Doyle's fancy, 
which, once released, far surpassed the original. Bell, a 
thin, wiry, dark man, had sharp, piercing, gray eyes, an 
eagle nose, and a high, strident voice. Sitting back in his 
chair, with fingers together, he would quickly note the 
peculiarities of the cases that were ushered into his 
room by Doyle, whom had had appointed as his out-patient clerk, and would treat his circle of students and 
dressers to this sort of thing: "Gentlemen, I am not 
quite sure whether this man is a cork-cutter or a slater. 
I observe a slight callus, or hardening, on one side of his 
forefinger, and a little thickening on the outside of his 
thumb, and that is a sure sign he is either one or the 
other." Another case was simple: "I see you're suffering 
from drink. You even carry a flask in the inside breast 
pocket of your coat." A third patient listened open-mouthed as Bell, after saying "A cobbler, I see," turned to 
his students and pointed out that the inside of the knee of 
the man's trousers was worn; that was where the man 
had rested the lapstone, a peculiarity only found in cobblers. One example of Bell's diagnosis impressed Doyle so much that he never forgot it:

"Well, my man, you've served in the army."

"Aye, sir."

"Not long discharged?"

"No, sir."

"A Highland regiment?"

"Aye, sir."

"A non-com. officer?"

"Aye, sir."

"Stationed at Barbados?"

"Aye, sir."

"You see, gentlemen," explained Bell to his students, 

"the man was a respectful man but did not remove his 
hat. They do not in the army, but he would have 
learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He 
has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As 
to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West 
Indian and not British."

Bell described his own methods in Holmesian style:

"The precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation 
of minor differences is the real essential factor in all successful medical diagnosis... Eyes and ears which can 
see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at 
pleasure the impressions of the senses, and an imagination 
capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken 
chain or unraveling a tangled clue, such are the implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician."

But Holmes has been fathered on several fictional 
characters as well, and it is probable that his precise 
method first appeared in Voltaire's Zadig. A man who 
has lost a camel asks Zadig whether he has seen it. "You 
mean a camel with one eye and defective teeth, I suppose?" returns Zadig. "No, I have not seen it, but it has 
strayed towards the west." Then if he has not seen it, 
how on earth does he know of its physical omissions, 
to say nothing of its direction? Elementary, my dear 
Watson. "I knew it had but one eye because it cropped 
the grass on one side of the road only. I knew it had lost 
some of its teeth because the grass was not bitten off. I 
knew it had strayed towards the west because of its foot-prints." D'Artagnan's reconstruction of the duel in
Louise de la Valliere is also done in the Holmesian manner, and there are those who trace the greatest of all 
detectives to Dickens and Wilkie Collins. "As I was 
brought up on Dickens's Inspector Bucket, Wilkie Collins's Sergeant Cuff, and Poe's Dupin, I thought nothing 
of Sherlock Holmes," Bernard Shaw informed me; "but 
the Brigadier Gerard stories were first rate." Doyle himself admitted his obligation to Poe on several occasions, 
but others have compared Holmes unfavorably with 
Dupin and made statements which cannot be substantiated: for example, Miss Dorothy Sayers, who asserts 
that Doyle's stories miss "the analytical purity" of Poe. 
She talks of "Poe's stern example of laying all the clues 
before the reader." Yet Poe's detective, Dupin, springs a 
vital clue on his friend at the conclusion of his analysis 
of a crime when all the facts have been laid bare. "I 
disentangled this little tuft from the rigidly clutched 
fingers of Madame L'Espanaye," says he. We should at 
least have seen him disentangle it. And later, when his 
friend is amazed at his deduction that the owner of the 
ape is a sailor, Dupin produces a small piece of ribbon 
which has "evidently been used in tying the hair in one 
of those long queues of which sailors are so fond." This 
he has picked up on the scene of the crime. But his 
friend, and the reader, should have seen him pick it up. 
So much for Poe's "stern example"; and if, as Miss Sayers 
assures us, Doyle's stories lack the analytical purity of 
Poe, so do Poe's stories.

Doyle, however, would have been the first to admit 
that he took a few hints from Poe's detective. Dupin, 
like Holmes, is a phenomenal pipe-smoker; is subject to 
"moody reverie"; sometimes refuses to talk of a case while 
pondering on it; breaks in on his friend's train of thought 
and continues his reflection for him, showing the various 
stages of his reverie; traps a man who can clear up the 
crime by an advertisement in the paper; arranges a tumult
in the street, and while the attention of his companion is 
diverted removes one letter and substitutes another; and, 
like Holmes, has a low opinion of his official colleague, 
who is "too cunning to be profound."

But all this is beside the point, which is that Doyle 
was the first writer to give vitality and personality to a 
detective, and will probably be the last writer to produce 
short stories that are as thrilling and entertaining as the 
chief characters are vivid. Dupin is still-born, a mere 
talking-machine; the longest story in which he appears, 
Marie Roget, is boring; and none of Poe's characters 
come to life. In fact Doyle's successors have been influenced by Poe far more than Doyle ever was. The scientific approach to a problem, the mass of details, the 
tedious reconstructions of events, the padding and trade-tools of modern detective fiction are blessedly absent in 
the Holmes saga, because Doyle did not in this case confuse entertainment with instruction; and while he spoilt 
his historical romances by making the history more important than the romance, he never made the same mistake with his detective fiction, where the fiction is always 
more important than the detection. It almost seems as if 
he wrote history with the pen of Holmes, who preferred 
a scientific treatise to an exciting story; but he chronicled 
Holmes with the pen of Watson, who preferred an exciting story to a scientific treatise.

So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle,<br />
The doll and its maker are never identical,

wrote Doyle to a critic who had suggested that Holmes's 
views on Poe's Dupin were those of his creator. We must 
be careful not to make the same error by assuming that 
Dr. Watson was Dr. Doyle. Nevertheless there was 
enough of Doyle in Watson to make it unnecessary for 
us to look further for a model. He frequently and unconsciously pictured himself in the character. "Your
fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of 
view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has 
ruined what might have been an instructive and even 
classical series of demonstrations," says Holmes to Watson, and it emphasizes what we have just been saying. 
Doyle was a born story-teller, and whenever he sacrifices 
action for accuracy his hold on the reader's attention 
weakens. Again Doyle was thinking of himself when he 
makes Holmes tell Watson: "You will realize that among 
your many talents dissimulation finds no place." Yet 
again: "My dear Watson, you were born to be a man 
of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic." And when, in the adventure of "The Abbey Grange," Holmes decides to let the murderer off, he clinches our Watson-Doyle identification: "Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was more 
eminently fitted to represent one," which gives us 
Doyle's nature in a sentence.

The notion of writing a series of short stories round 
the character of Holmes came to Doyle when he read 
the monthly magazines that were then beginning to cater 
to the train-traveling public. "Considering these various 
journals with their disconnected stories, it had struck me 
that a single character running through a series, if it only 
engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that 
reader to that particular magazine. On the other hand, 
it had long seemed to me that the ordinary serial might 
be an impediment rather than a help to a magazine, since, 
sooner or later, one missed one number and afterwards 
it had lost all interest. Clearly the ideal compromise was 
a character which carried through, and yet instalments 
which were each complete in themselves, so that the 
purchaser was always sure that he could relish the whole 
contents of the magazine. I believe that I was the first to  
realize this and The Strand Magazine the first to put it 
into practice." His agent, A. P. Watt, sent "A Scandal
in Bohemia" to the editor of The Strand, Greenhough 
Smith, who liked it and encouraged Doyle to go ahead 
with the series. As he was uninterrupted by the arrival of a
a single patient throughout the whole of his time as an 
eye specialist, he spent his days writing, from ten in the m
morning till four in the afternoon. "My rooms in Devonshire Place," said he, "consisted of a waiting-room and a consulting-room, where I waited in the consulting-room and no one waited in the waiting-room."

We may see how quickly he worked by glancing at 
his diary. On Friday, April Goth, a week after sending 
off "A Scandal in Bohemia," he noted: "Finished 'A Case 
of Identity.'" On Monday the loth he "Sent off 'The 
Red-Headed League.'" On the 27th he "Sent off 'The 
Boscombe Valley Mystery.' " After that he wrote 
"The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips," but it was not 
despatched until Monday the i8th May because he was 
prostrated by a severe attack of influenza on the 4th, 
when, on his morning walk to Devonshire Place, he was 
attacked by "icy shivers." Returning to his lodgings he 
collapsed. For a week he was in grave danger and for another week was as feeble as a baby; but in the later stages 
of the illness his mind became clear and he perceived that 
it was silly to finance himself as an oculist, whom no one 
wanted to consult, out of his earnings as a writer, whom 
everyone wanted to read. "I determined with a wild 
rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust for ever to 
my power of writing. I remember in my delight taking 
the handkerchief which lay upon the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation. I should at last be my own master. No longer would I have to conform to professional dress or try to please anyone else. I would be free to live how I liked a
and where I liked. It was one of the great moments of 
exultation of my life. The date was in August 1891." 
He gives the month as August in his autobiography, but
the diary tells us May, and the diary is right. As in the 
case of his sojourn in Vienna, his memory exaggerated 
the period of his probation, which largely explains the 
relief he felt when at length he decided to drop doctoring and take up writing as a profession. It was not a particularly risky step, for we learn from the April entries 
of his diary that he received £57 8s. 9d. for a short story 
called "Lot No. 249," that he got £40 for the American 
serial rights of Raffles Haw, and that he was paid £30 
12s. for the English serial rights and £50 for the American serial rights of "A Scandal in Bohemia." In the years 
ahead he was to earn about ten times as much for a single 
Holmes story as he received for the first; but the average 
payment for each of the first six Adventures to appear in 
The Strand was just over £30, rising to £45 for the last six.

Recovering from his attack of influenza, he began to 
move about with the aid of a stick and to interview 
house-agents. After spending two or three weeks in 
search of a suburban home, he at last chose No. 12 Tennyson Road, South Norwood, where he and his family 
settled in on June 25th. Almost simultaneously "A Scandal in Bohemia" appeared in the July number of The 
Strand, and Doyle quickly became a figure of note in the 
literary world. The two long stories, A Study in Scarlet 
and The Sign of Four, had not popularized Holmes, but 
the short stories in The Strand made his name a house-hold word. A name which now seems to us so inevitable 
was not an inspiration but the result of patient consideration. Doyle took a slip of paper and abandoned himself 
to the task of fitting Christian names to surnames. At 
first the sound of "Sherringford Holmes" pleased him; 
then he dallied with "Sherrington Hope"; finally, at the 
bottom of the slip, appeared "Sherlock Holmes." He 
worked on each "adventure" with as much care as he 
had given to the leading character's name, first of all
thinking out the problem and its solution, then sketching 
the main outline, then writing the story. Among his 
papers I discovered a scenario for an uncompleted tale 
which gives us a rough idea of the early stages of his work 
before he filled it out and pulled it together, though it 
is quite likely that he had bought the plot from someone 
else.

Plot of Sherlock Holmes Story.

A girl calls on Sherlock Holmes in great distress. A 
murder has been committed in her village — her uncle has 
been found shot in his bedroom, apparently through the 
open window. Her lover has been arrested. He is suspected on several grounds.

(1) He has had a violent quarrel with the old man, who has threatened to alter his will, which is in the girl's favor, if she ever speaks to her lover again.

(2) A revolver has been found in his house, with his initials scratched on the butt, and one chamber discharged. The bullet found in the dead man's body fits this revolver.

(3) He possesses a light ladder, the only one in the village, and there are the marks of the foot of such a ladder on the soil below the bedroom window, while similar soil (fresh) has been found on the feet of the ladder.

His only reply is that he never possessed a revolver, 
and that it has been discovered in a drawer of the hatstand 
in his hall, where it would be easy for anyone to place it. 
As for the mould on the ladder (which he has not used 
for a month) he has no explanation whatever.

Notwithstanding these damning proofs, however, the 
girl persists in believing her lover to be perfectly innocent, while she suspects another man, who has also been 
making love to her, though she has no evidence whatever 
against him, except that she feels by instinct that he is a 
villain who would stick at nothing.

Sherlock and Watson go down to the village and inspect the spot, together with the detective in charge of 
the case. The marks of the ladder attract Holmes's special 
attention. He ponders — looks about him — inquires if there
is any place where anything bulky could be concealed. 
There is — a disused well, which has not been searched 
because apparently nothing is missing. Sherlock, however, insists on the well being explored. A village boy 
consents to be lowered into it, with a candle. Before he 
goes down Holmes whispers something in his ear — he appears surprised. The boy is lowered and, on his signal, 
pulled up again. He brings to the surface a pair of stilts! 
"Good Lord!" cries the detective, "who on earth could 
have expected this?" — "I did," replies Holmes. — "But 
why?" — "Because the marks on the garden soil were made 
by two perpendicular poles — the feet of a ladder, which 
is on the slope, would have made depressions slanting 
towards the wall."

(N.B. The soil was a strip beside a gravel path on which the stilts left no impression.)

This discovery lessened the weight of the evidence of 
the ladder, though the other evidence remained.

The next step was to trace the user of the stilts, if possible. But he had been too wary, and after two days nothing had been discovered. At the inquest the young man was found guilty of murder. But Holmes is convinced of his innocence. In these circumstances, and as a last hope, he resolves on a sensational stratagem.

He goes up to London, and, returning on the evening 
of the day when the old man is buried, he and Watson 
and the detective go to the cottage of the man whom the 
girl suspects, taking with them a man whom Holmes has 
brought from London, who has a disguise which makes 
him the living image of the murdered man, wizened body, 
grey shrivelled face, skull-cap, and all. They have also 
with them the pair of stilts. On reaching the cottage, the  
disguised man mounts the stilts and stalks up the path 
towards the man's open bedroom window, at the same 
time crying out his name in a ghastly sepulchral voice. 
The man, who is already half mad with guilty terrors, 
rushes to the window and beholds in the moonlight the 
terrific spectacle of his victim stalking towards him. He 
reels back with a scream as the apparition, advancing 
to the window, calls in the same unearthly voice — "As 
you came for me, I have come for you!" When the party
rush upstairs into his room he darts to them, clinging to 
them, gasping, and, pointing to the window, where the 
dead man's face is glaring in, shrieks out, "Save me! My 
God! He has come for me as I came for him."

Collapsing after this dramatic scene, he makes a full 
confession. He has marked the revolver, and concealed it 
where it was found—he has also smeared the ladder-foot 
with soil from the old man's garden. His object was to put his rival out of the way, in the hope of gaining possession of the girl and her money.

Presumably Doyle scrapped this because he felt on reflection that the episode of the stilts was rather tall.

As we have seen, he seldom took more than a week to 
write a story. While living in South Norwood, where the 
last seven of the Adventures and all the Memoirs were 
written, he worked from breakfast to lunch and from five 
to eight in the evening, averaging three thousand words 
a day, and many of his ideas came to him in the afternoons when walking or cricketing or tricycling or playing tennis. In August 1892 he told an interviewer that he was fearful of spoiling a character of which he was particularly fond, but that he had enough material to 
carry him through another series (the Memoirs), the 
opening story of which was in his view so unsolvable 
that he had bet his wife a shilling she would not guess 
the explanation. It was a safe bet: "Silver Blaze" is one of 
his most brilliant bits of work. His fondness for Holmes 
did not survive the Memoirs. After killing his detective 
in the December (1893) number of The Strand, the 
method having been suggested by a visit with his wife to 
the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, he wrote to a 
friend: "I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for  
years, for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel 
towards him as I do towards pate de foie gras, of which 
I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a 
sickly feeling to this day." But he was to have no peace 
until he resurrected Sherlock. Readers implored him,
editors cajoled him, agents worried him, publishers tried 
to bribe him, some people even threatened him. For a 
long time he turned a deaf ear to both curses and prayers, but at last his rate of expenditure decided the issue, 
and when a friend told him the legend of a ghostly Dartmoor hound he completely transformed it into an early 
adventure of Sherlock Holmes, which, as The Hound of 
the Baskervilles, appeared in The Strand from August 
1901 to April 1902. This merely whetted the appetite 
of the public, and Doyle brought Holmes back to life in 
October 1903, when "The Empty House" commenced 
a new series in The Strand.

But his readers could not have a surfeit of Sherlock 
and went on asking for more; which made Doyle hate 
Holmes, whose notoriety interfered with a proper appreciation of what he considered his best work, and gave 
him a lot of trouble into the bargain. His dislike of 
Holmes took the curious form of praising Watson. Monsignor R. A. Knox writes to me: "Long ago, when we 
were boys, my brothers and I questioned him about an 
inconsistency in one of the Holmes stories, and he wrote 
back quite kindly to say it was an error. Later, about 
1912 or 1913, when I published an article on 'The Mind 
and Art of Sherlock Holmes,' a skit which gave impetus 
to that Holmesology which has since become rather tiresome, Sir Arthur wrote to me admitting that there were 
plenty of inconsistencies, but claiming that at least he 
had made Watson a consistent character all through." 
He received hundreds of letters from all parts of the 
world, some addressed to Holmes begging him to solve 
problems, some addressed to Watson offering him substantial sums if he could prevail with his friend to undertake cases, some addressed to Doyle himself requesting 
his assistance in unraveling mysteries. Occasionally he 
was attracted by the problem put before him and helped
to clear it up, for which purpose he had to lock himself 
in a room and imagine he was Sherlock Holmes. Now 
and then he was successful, though it would be difficult 
to imagine a man less like the Holmes of print or picture. 
Incidentally the Holmes of the well-known pictures was 
not the Holmes as Doyle had pictured him. Sidney 
Paget, who did the first illustrations for The Strand, took 
his younger brother as a model, with the result we know; 
but Doyle had originally seen Holmes with a thin, razor-like face, "a great hawks-bill of a nose, and two small eyes, set close together on either side of it." However, Paget's Holmes remains that of the popular fancy, reinforced by the detective's impersonators on the stage and screen.

Doyle was to be dogged by Holmes for the rest of his 
life, and three additions were made to the series after 
The Return: another long story called The Valley of 
Fear, the first and best of the "gangster" yarns which 
achieved such an extraordinary vogue in the heyday of 
Edgar Wallace, and further collections of short stories in 
His Last Bow and The Case-Book. Doyle knew that the 
ideal detective story is short; and in his four long ones 
he is careful not to overdo Holmes, but to maintain the 
interest by telling a story within the story. Although the 
continued demand for Holmes annoyed him so much 
that he came to undervalue the work that had made him 
world-famous, he always took great pains over every 
addition to the saga, and some of the best stories were 
written after the resurrection in 1903. "I was determined," said he, "now that I had no longer the excuse 
of absolute pecuniary pressure, never again to write anything which was not as good as I could possibly make it, 
and therefore I would not write a Holmes story without 
a worthy plot and without a problem which interested 
my own mind, for that is the first requisite before you
can interest anyone else. If I have been able to sustain this 
character for a long time, and if the public find, as they 
will find, that the last story is as good as the first, it is 
entirely due to the fact that I never, or hardly ever, 
forced a story."

When people complained that the later tales were not 
on a level with the earlier ones, he usually protested. To 
John Gore, who made the accusation while the concluding series were coming out in The Strand, he wrote:

"I read with interest, and without offence, your remarks about the Holmes stories. I could not be offended for I have never taken them seriously myself. But still even in the humblest things there are degrees, and I wonder whether the smaller impression which they produce upon you may not be due to the fact that we become 
blase and stale ourselves as we grow older. My own 
youthful favourites no longer appeal.

"I test the Holmes stories by their effect on fresh 
young minds and I find that they stand that test well. I 
believe in my own critical capacity, for it is very detached, and if I were to choose the six best Holmes 
stories I should certainly include 'The Illustrious Client' 
which is one of the last series, and also 'The Lion's 
Mane' which is the next to appear. 'The Noble Bachelor' 
which you quote would be about the bottom of the list.

"I have always said that I would utterly abolish him 
the moment he got below his level, but up to now, save 
for your note (which may perhaps prove symptomatic) 
I have seen no sign that he has lost his grip."
The sixtieth and final adventure of Sherlock Holmes, 

"Shoscombe Old Place," appeared in The Strand for April 1927, when Doyle made his last bow as the creator of two characters who have probably given more pleasure to millions of people all over the world than any others in fiction and as the author of the best of all fairy-tales for grown-ups. "And so, reader, Farewell to Sherlock Holmes," he wrote. "I thank you for your constancy and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be 
found in the fairy kingdom of romance."


=== 7. Friends and Fame ===

Visitors at No. 12 Tennyson Road, South Norwood, 
were surprised to find their host about as unlike his famous creation as it was possible for a man to be. Walking 
up a well-kept drive, they saw a red brick house with a 
projecting balcony over the entrance. From the grounds 
they could enjoy an unimpaired view of a broad stretch 
of fertile open country, backed by the Surrey hills. They 
were shown into a comfortable room with a view of the 
lawn, whereon, as likely as not, they would see a gentleman practicing shots with a golf club. He was dressed 
in a suit of "rough heather mixture" and looked like a 
Life Guardsman. Noting that he was treating the turf 
with some familiarity, and that a number of golf balls 
lay about awaiting his attention, they would assume that  
he was a near relation, or at least a close friend of the 
family. It was a large walled garden and the Life Guardsman seemed quite at home in it. A servant approached 
him, spoke a few words, and he, dropping his club, made 
for the house. It took the visitors some time to realize  
that the soldierly man who now entered the room and 
gave them such a friendly greeting was the creator of
Sherlock Holmes. The shock of disillusionment was followed by a sense of relief, it being instantaneously obvious that the healthy, hefty fellow before them was quite incapable of inferring anything about them from anything else about them.

He soon made friends, because he was so homely, so 
unassuming, so eager, so ingenuous, and indeed so 
friendly. The general impression he made was summed 
up in the statement that there was "no nonsense about 
him." This simply meant, in those days, that he had nothing of the artist about him; for it was an effeminate 
affectation among late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers (an affectation against which Oscar 
Wilde was in healthy revolt) that the sword, the platform, and the cricket bat were manlier than the pen, and 
that a story-teller was a mere scribbler who felt abashed 
in the presence of a man of action, reverent in the presence of a politician, and humble in the presence of a 
sportsman. Anthony Hope, whose Prisoner of Zenda 
scored a bull's eye in the 'nineties, expressed his envy of 
Doyle, "who wrote good books, yet looked as if he had 
never heard of such a thing in his life."

One of his first friends in the literary world was 
Jerome K. Jerome, whose Three Men in a Boat convulsed 
his contemporaries and to whose paper The Idler Doyle 
contributed stories. In his autobiography Doyle described 
Jerome as "hot-headed and intolerant in political matters." When Jerome read this he was amazed. "It is precisely what I should have said myself concerning Doyle," 
he retorted. They went for a holiday to Norway in those 
early years of friendship, and Doyle started to learn Norwegian on the boat, picking it up so quickly that he 
began to air his knowledge on all sorts of occasions. Then 
one day, according to Jerome, "he lost his head." They 
had gone up to a rest-house among the mountains in 
stoljas — one-person carriages drawn by small sturdy
ponies. While they were at lunch a young officer entered 
and addressed them in Norwegian. Doyle rose, bowed, 
and answered him. The officer was charmed. Doyle became eloquent. And after a while the officer left. Asked 
what they had talked about, Doyle replied carelessly, 
"Oh, just about the weather, and the state of the roads, 
and how some relation of his had hurt his leg. Of course 
I didn't understand all of it." He changed the conversation. Lunch over, the stoljas were brought out, but 
Doyle's pony was missing. Enquiries were made and 
Doyle was informed that he had lent it to the young 
officer, whose own pony had gone lame. The waiter had 
overheard the conversation and assured Doyle that he 
had said, "Certainly, with pleasure," and "Don't mention 
it," several times in Norwegian. Fortunately a member 
of their party decided to put in a day or two at the resthouse and lent his stolja to Doyle, who talked less Norwegian for the remainder of the trip.

A fellow-contributor to The Idler was Eden Phillpotts, who, in a letter to me (November 1941) remembered Doyle as "a typical Englishman and a most kindly 
man who loved sport and literature in about equal proportions. I never met him again after he went over, lock, 
stock, and barrel, to the spiritualists, and my memory of 
him embraces no shadow of the interests he afterwards 
developed. I only recollect a rare, big-hearted, friendly 
man who loved cricket and billiards..." Two other 
contemporaries gave me their impressions of Doyle in 
the 'nineties. "He struck me as a strong, direct sort of 
man," wrote W. W. Jacobs; while Sir Bernard Partridge 
touched a different note: "He always seemed to me a 
quiet, gentle, lovable character, with little of his real self 
showing on the surface." Through those four pairs of 
eyes we are able to see Doyle in the first flush of his 
fame: a simple, reserved, proud, friendly, outspoken, 
warm-hearted, hot-headed, big boy of a man.

Perhaps the author he liked best among his contemporaries was James Barrie, whom he met in connection with 
The Idler and whose cricket team he joined. Doyle 
brought an element of gravity into the game which was 
not in harmony with the festive spirit in which Barrie's 
eleven played. "Doyle was a serious cricketer and had no 
use for rotting," I was told by A. E. W. Mason, who 
joined the team later on. But as, between "quips and 
cranks and wanton wiles," it was necessary to put up 
some sort of a fight, Doyle was invaluable to his side, 
which he frequently saved from ignominious defeat by 
making more runs and taking more wickets than all the 
rest put together.

The transition from cricket to comic opera seemed 
natural, and Barrie asked Doyle to finish a libretto which 
he had been commissioned to write for D'Oyly Carte, 
who was frantically combing the world of wit for someone who could behave better than W. S. Gilbert and 
write as well. As time went on he discovered that everyone behaved better but that no one could write as well. 
Nothing could have been more courteous than the manners of Barrie and Doyle, nothing less witty than their 
libretto. Barrie sketched out the plot and wrote Act I. 
Then he handed it to Doyle, who toned up some of the 
lyrics in Act I and polished off Act II. The odd result, 
which was called Jane Annie, appeared at the Savoy in 
the spring of '93. Bernard Shaw's criticism in The World 
explains why it disappeared in the spring of the same 
year: "It would ill become me, as a brother of the literary craft, to pretend to congratulate them seriously upon  
the most unblushing outburst of tomfoolery that two 
responsible citizens could conceivably indulge in publicly... The high privilege of joking in public should never be granted except to people who know thoroughly what they are joking about — that is, to exceptionally serious and laborious people. Now in Jane Annie the
authors do not impress me as having taken their work 
seriously or labored honestly over it. I make no allowances for their performances in ordinary fiction; anybody can write a novel. A play — especially a music-play — is a different matter — different, too, in the sense of being weightier, not lighter." After that Barrie and Doyle 
confined their collaboration to cricket.

On two later occasions Doyle was asked to finish the 
works of other men. R. L. Stevenson wrote to say that 
he had been retailing several Sherlock Holmes stories to 
his Samoan servants, and Doyle was delighted by the 
approbation of a writer he admired so much. After 
Stevenson's death his executors asked Doyle to finish St.  
Ives, of which R. L. S. had written about three-quarters.  
Doyle "did not feel equal to the task." Some years later 
Grant Allen made a dying request: would Doyle write 
the last two numbers of his novel Hilda Wade, then being serialized in The Strand? Under the circumstances he could not refuse and did the job, whether successfully  or not I have taken no steps to find out.

The literary connection which made him especially 
proud in the South Norwood days was with George 
Meredith. Nowadays people wonder how it was that 
Meredith became the idol of his fellow-scribes during 
the last twenty years of his life. There are two reasons.  
First, his works were often difficult to read and frequently impossible to understand, which argued (1) that he was a great stylist and (2) that he was a profound thinker. Second, the general public never read him; and there being no likelihood of his competing with the current best-sellers, his contemporaries were on a safe 
wicket in cracking him up. Moreover, it is always a dignified thing for a profession to have a Grand Old Man, 
someone to look up to, an acknowledged monarch; and 
as Thomas Hardy was not respectable enough in the 
'nineties, and Meredith was socially and politically
"safe," he was the obvious choice. Hardy's turn came 
later, when he was too old to be dangerous.

Having decided, after the death of Carlyle, that Meredith was the leading figure in contemporary literature, 
Conan Doyle wrote articles on his work and in November '92 lectured on him to the Upper Norwood Literary 
and Scientific Society. Naturally he was invited to see 
the master at Box Hill. The meeting began, and almost 
ended, at the garden gate. Pointing to the hill behind his 
house, Meredith said, "I have just been up to the top for 
a walk." Doyle, having read in the papers that Meredith's 
health had been poorly, said in surprise, "You must be 
in good trim to do it." Meredith replied angrily, "That 
would be a proper compliment to pay to an octogenarian." Doyle was nettled. "I understood that I was 
talking to an invalid," said he. Meredith swallowed his 
wrath, and Doyle absorbed a bottle of Burgundy over 
lunch while listening to his host's conversation. Afterwards they climbed the steep and narrow path to the 
summer-house where Meredith worked. Doyle, who 
went first, heard Meredith slip and fall on the path behind him; but he had learned his lesson, did not look 
round, and went on as if unconscious of the other's accident. "He was a fiercely proud old man, and my instincts 
told me that his humiliation in being helped up would 
be far greater than any relief I could give him." Safe at 
the summer-house Meredith read an unfinished novel, 
which Doyle liked so much that Meredith said he would 
complete it; so the world probably owes The Amazing 
Marriage to Doyle's tact in not hauling the author to his feet.

Meanwhile, between cricket matches and literary adventures, Doyle was working very hard and doing pretty well. His diary, which has no interest for us after his first year as a professional author, shows his upward progress during 1891. Here are a few extracts:

June 1. "Contracted with Good Words to write 'Good Cheer' (42,000) at £150. MS to be ready by Sept. 1st."

This story, which he called Beyond the City, and despatched on July 8, was of a domestic nature, and the combination of Good Words with "Good Cheer" had a cramping effect on his style.

July 7. "Bought 250 shares in 'Newnes Ltd.'"<br />
Aug. 15. "Started for Holland."<br />
Aug. 26. "Arrived from Holland."

He went with a cricket team and played several games, 
finishing the tour at The Hague, where they were 
matched against United Holland and where Doyle saved 
his side by taking the last four wickets for as many runs. 
Transported by his performance, the stalwarts of the 
English team hoisted him on to their shoulders and carried him from the field; but his sixteen stones were too much for them, and their Dutch opponents were not displeased when he fell to the ground with a crash that left him breathless. In other respects he continued to rise:

Oct. 5. "Signed Agreement with Cassell's they to pay 
20 per cent. Royalty on published price, accounts 
made up June 30, December 30. 100 down on 
passing of proofs."<br />
Oct. 26. "White Company Came Out. Received £250."<br />
Nov. 13. "Received £125 from Balestier for American Rights of The White Company.'"<br />
Nov. 16. "Paid £260 for 200 more shares in Titbits, being 26/— per share."<br />
Dec. 3. "Paid £19 10s. for 15 more shares in Tit Bits at 26/-."

He made about £1500 from his pen in 1891, which 
was not bad as a start-off, and he was careful to note 
that he had written 210,000 words during the year, of
which he estimated 30,000 for the first hundred and fifty 
pages of a new historical novel, The Refugees, which 
deals with the French Huguenots, whom he admired as 
much as the English Puritans. His earlier romances had 
been influenced by Scott, but this one was influenced by 
Dumas, and, except for two or three of Stanley Weyman's, The Refugees is the best novel in English of the 
Dumas school. Of course Doyle's book suffers from his 
unshakable conviction that in order to recreate a period 
one has to introduce a number of prominent people who 
lived in it, and so the romance halts while all the leading 
figures of the time parade before us; but whenever he is 
not busy unrolling his panorama of history, and providing us with a Court Guide for the reign of Louis XIV, 
the tale goes at a rattling pace, and the action-episodes 
are as thrilling as anything of the kind in Dumas. Part 
II, which takes us to Canada, owes something to the historian Francis Parkman, whom Doyle, impressed by his industry, considered America's "greatest serious writer."

He wrote two more works while at South Norwood:
The Stark Munro Letters, which is largely autobiographical and deals with his Plymouth and Portsmouth 
experiences; and The Great Shadow, wherein his boyish 
admiration for Napoleon first bubbles over into a book. 
He seems to have written it for the sole purpose of describing the battle of Waterloo, which he does with all 
the gusto of one who savors slaughter from a comfortable distance. He tells, for example, how a ball "knocked 
five men into a bloody mash, and I saw it lying on the 
ground afterwards like a crimson football. Another went 
through the adjutant's horse with a plop like a stone in 
the mud, broke its back and left it lying like a burst 
gooseberry." Always anxious to see fighting at close 
quarters, Doyle applied for the job of war correspondent 
to the Central News and got it. There was a chance in 
the early 'nineties of a scrap with France in Egypt, but
nothing came of it, and Doyle had to content himself 
with heroism on paper. He turned one of his short war 
stories, "A Straggler of '15," into a one-act play, which 
Henry Irving bought outright for £100 in 1892. A few 
years later it was rechristened A Story of Waterloo and 
produced at the Lyceum, when Irving, as Corporal 
Brewster, made a deep impression on all the critics except Bernard Shaw, who said that "he depicts with convincing art the state of an old man's joints." It became 
a stock piece with Irving, and although he had purchased the copyright he paid the author a guinea for 
every performance. Doyle himself thought that Irving's 
son, H. B., was better in the part of Brewster. If so, 
Shaw's criticism of the original was justified, for I remember H. B.'s acting in the playlet as a grotesque 
caricature of old age. Before Henry Irving accepted it 
Doyle sent the MS. to George Moore and asked whether 
he had any suggestions to make. "I do not know if your 
play would act — that is to say if a few alterations would 
fit it for the stage," Moore told the unpracticed playwright, "but I do know that it made me cry like a child. 
I think it is the most pathetic thing I ever read in my 
life." Doyle had "laughed and sobbed" while writing it, 
and audience after audience laughed and sobbed when 
witnessing it, so everybody was pleased.

His increasing success enabled Doyle to help his family. His mother left Edinburgh and settled down at East 
Grinstead. One of his sisters had died at Lisbon before 
he could make life easier for her, but the other two, 
Lottie and Connie, had a second home with him whenever they cared to make use of it and were no longer 
forced to do uncongenial work. His brother Innes also 
benefited from his prosperity. Connie lived with them at 
Tennyson Road, where Doyle's son Kingsley was born, 
and a regular visitor was E. W. Hornung, who eventually 
married Connie and emphasized the family relationship
by converting Holmes into "Raffles" and Watson into 
"Bunny." In claiming that Hornung had "a finer wit" 
than Dr. Johnson, Doyle made the mistake of preserving 
two specimens. When shown a newspaper cutting in 
which someone stated that he had run ioo yards in less 
than ten seconds, Hornung said, "It's a sprinter's error." 
When asked why he refused to play golf, Hornung declared that it was "unsportsmanlike to hit a sitting ball." 
Neither of those remarks, though neat enough, qualifies 
for the class of wit we associate with Johnson. In fact 
Doyle, while praising the doctor heartily, did not speak 
of him with much intelligence. He wondered how Johnson on his visit to Paris could have failed to foresee the 
French Revolution. "We read that an amiable Monsieur 
Sansterre showed him over his brewery and supplied him 
with statistics as to his output of beer," wrote Doyle. 
"It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up 
the drums to drown Louis' voice at the scaffold. The 
association shows how near the unconscious sage was to 
the edge of that precipice and how little his learning 
availed him in discerning it." It is not always easy, even 
for a lexicographer, to infer a foul-mouthed murderer 
from an amiable merchant, or blood from beer. Doyle 
must have confused Dr. Johnson with Sherlock Holmes.

As we know, the holiday that Doyle and his wife 
took in Switzerland suggested a satisfying method of 
killing Sherlock Holmes; but it also very nearly killed 
Mrs. Doyle. A few weeks after their return she developed a cough and was seized with pain in her side. Doyle 
sent for "the nearest good physician" and was alarmed 
to hear that her lungs were seriously affected. A specialist confirmed that she had "galloping consumption," and 
declared that she had only a few months to live. "I then 
set all my energy to work to save the situation. The 
home was abandoned, the newly bought furniture was 
sold, and we made for Davos in the High Alps where
there seemed the best chance of killing this accursed 
microbe which was rapidly eating out her vitals. And we 
succeeded... we postponed the fatal issue from 1893 
to 1906." His sister Lottie went with them, and as Mrs. 
Doyle seldom suffered from pain, and was cheerful and 
contented by nature, the family were able to enjoy the 
scenery.

By the time Sherlock Holmes disappeared at the falls 
of Reichenbach Doyle's fame was becoming international. He had already done a certain amount of lecturing in England and Scotland, and had rather enjoyed it. 
In '94 he was asked to give a series of talks and readings  
in America, and as there was already a marked improvement in the condition of his wife he set forth in October 
of that year, promising to be back for Christmas and 
taking as a companion his brother Innes, who was about 
to become a subaltern in the army. His visit was successful and he could have returned with a small fortune if 
he had continued to the end of the season. As usual people were taken aback by his appearance. "A thrill of disappointment ran through the hall as he stepped on to the 
platform." But after recovering from the blow the audience warmed to him. Though he read his works without 
the least attempt to bring out their dramatic qualities, 
there was something about himself, a calmness, a solidity,  
an air of self-possession, that his listeners found attractive. Naturally they wanted to meet him and were 
greatly disappointed when his impresario, Major Pond, 
had to break the news that he had made a bee-line for 
the stage-door at the conclusion of the reading. On one 
occasion Pond promised a group of prominent New 
York ladies that they should be introduced to the lecturer, and begged Doyle, who was just about to appear 
on the stage, to remain behind for the purpose. "Oh, 
Major, I cannot, I cannot," was the agitated reply. 
"What do they want of me? Let me get away. I haven't
the courage to look anybody in the face." But whenever 
he was cornered, he braced himself to the ordeal and made a good impression.

Pond noticed that he was a hot-blooded man, who 
seldom wore an overcoat even in the coldest weather 
and removed his waistcoat when lecturing in the afternoon, buttoning up his "Prince Albert coat" instead. He 
liked everything in the States, except the heat of the 
hotel lobbies, of the public halls and the railway cars, and 
seemed to like everyone he met. Not a single American 
custom or institution drew an unfavorable comment 
from him, and wherever he went he expressed his hope 
for a permanent Anglo-American friendship and his 
belief that civilization depended upon the union of the 
two countries. He surprised the members of the Lotos 
Club, who entertained him at dinner, by saying that the 
Americans, who visited the Old World in order to capture the spirit of romance and thought their own life 
prosaic, were hedged in with romance on every side. "I 
feel keenly the romance of Europe," said he. "I love the 
memories of the shattered castle and the crumbling 
abbey, of the steel-clad knight and the archer; but to me 
the romance of the redskin and the trapper is more vivid, 
as being more recent. It is so piquant also to stay in a 
comfortable inn, where you can have your hair dressed 
by a barber, at the same place where a century ago you 
might have been left with no hair to dress." An enthusiast 
for European romance could have rejoined that the real 
charm of being manicured in some Old World city lay 
in the reflection that only two centuries before one might 
have been fitted with thumbscrews on the same spot. 
Doyle would probably have agreed, for he went on to 
say that in the rush of cable cars and the ringing of telephone bells he seemed to catch the echoes of the woods-man's ax and of the scout's rifle. Such an appreciative visitor was naturally popular, and we learn without surprise that he was "tendered more honors from clubs and 
societies" than any other Englishman; and six years later 
Major Pond declared that he would give Doyle "more 
money today than any Englishman I know of if he would 
return for a hundred nights."

In 1894 a less appreciative Briton was residing in the 
United States and expressing opinions which implied that 
his conception of Utopia did not include an Anglo-American alliance. Doyle wrote to remonstrate, and received an invitation to visit Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling in Vermont, where he spent two days. "The 
poet read me 'McAndrew's Hymn,' which he had just 
done, and surprised me by his dramatic power which 
enabled him to sustain the Glasgow accent throughout, 
so that the angular Scottish greaser simply walked the 
room. I had brought up my golf clubs and gave him 
lessons in a field while the New England rustics watched 
us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at, for 
golf was unknown in America at that time. We parted 
good friends, and the visit was an oasis in my rather 
dreary pilgrimage as a lecturer."

Altogether Doyle gave forty readings, visiting all the 
big cities, from Boston to Washington, from New York 
to Chicago. In spite of his social and professional engagements he found time to play golf in all weathers and indulge his fancy in literary pilgrimages: to the grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to places associated with Poe, to the Parkman country. He made about £1000 over and above the expenses of his brother and himself, and 
having been impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of 
Sam McClure he decided to invest that sum in the magazine which McClure was trying to keep afloat. He therefore called at the office and planked down the cash, 
saying, "McClure, I believe in you and in the future of 
your magazine." McClure was down to his last cent and 
had spent a part of that morning on his knees offering
up prayers for succor, so Doyle's arrival seemed like the 
direct answer of Providence. In exchange for the cash 
McClure gave 1000 shares in a rocky concern at face 
value, which caused Doyle to wonder, as the years went 
by and he received no benefit from the transaction, why 
Providence had been so one-sided in her favors. But 
eventually she justified her mysterious ways, for twenty 
years later Doyle was able to dispose of his shares "at a 
reasonable advance."

The Aldine Club gave him a farewell dinner on December 6th, when he entertained the members with numerous stories. The next day he sailed, so thoroughly exhausted by his labors that he spent most of the time between New York and Liverpool in his bunk.

Among the readings from his own works that he had given at Daly's Theater, New York, was an unpublished tale entitled "The Medal of Brigadier Gerard."


=== 8. The Brigadier ===

At Davos the lives of Doyle and his family were 
"bounded by the snow and fir which girt us in," and his 
time was taken up by work and sport. An English translation of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot had been 
issued in 1892, and this had stimulated him to re-read 
the French version, which he described as "the first of 
all soldier books in the world." Having been inspired to 
write the adventures of a soldier of the Empire, with 
Marbot as his model, he devoured every book on the 
Napoleonic wars that he could borrow or buy in order 
to get his details historically accurate. The first story, 
which he had read to his American audiences, appeared 
in The Strand for December 1894, and from April to 
September '95 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard thrilled 
the readers of that magazine, the last of them being published in the December number.

Let us see to what extent the creator of Brigadier Gerard was indebted to the "Memoirs" of Marbot.

First of all we notice that Marbot does not think much 
of the brains of his superiors, whose valor he indulgently 
praises—sometimes. His own intelligence is implied
throughout, while his valor is stated in more exact terms: 
"I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has 
allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will even add 
that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, 
as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services 
prove, I think, sufficiently." He explains why official 
recognition of his bravery is so tardy: "Nowadays, when 
promotions and decorations are bestowed so lavishly, 
some reward would certainly be given to an officer who 
had braved danger as I had done in reaching the 14th 
regiment; but under the Empire a devoted act of that 
kind was thought so natural that I did not receive the 
cross, nor did it ever occur to me to ask for it." However, the time comes when Napoleon can no longer 
ignore his deserts: "Augereau spoke of the devoted manner in which I had carried orders to that regiment 
through the swarming Cossacks, and entered into full 
details of the dangers which I had run in accomplishing 
that mission, and of the really miraculous manner in 
which I had escaped death after being stripped and left 
naked on the snow. The Emperor replied: 'Marbot's 
conduct was admirable, and I have given him the Cross 
for it.' " He is never backward in giving examples of 
his courage, which certainly deserve his notice. At one 
engagement, though wounded and only able to use one 
arm, he insists on taking part in a cavalry action "in 
order to put still more dash into my regiment, and to 
show that, so long as I could sit on my horse, I felt 
bound in honor to command it in the hour of danger." 
At Jena, after the battle, he hears cries from a house, 
rushes in, and sees "two charming young ladies of eighteen to twenty years old, in night-dresses, struggling with 
four or five Hessian soldiers... The men were far gone 
in liquor; but though they did not understand a word of 
French, and I very little German, the sight of me and 
my threats produced an effect on them, and being used
to the stick from their officers they took without a word 
the kicks and blows which, in my indignation, I administered to them freely as I drove them down the stairs. 
Perhaps I was imprudent, for in the middle of the night, 
in a town where utter disorder prevailed, being all alone 
with these men, I ran the risk of being killed by them; 
but they ran away, and I placed a guard from the marshal's escort in one of the lower rooms. Then I returned 
to the young ladies' rooms; they had hurriedly put on 
some clothes, and I received from them warm expressions 
of gratitude." In Russia, following an action, Napoleon 
sends promotions and decorations to the 23rd Chasseurs 
commanded by Marbot: "I assembled all the captains, 
and, guiding myself by their advice, I drew up my list 
and went to present it to Marshal Oudinot, begging him 
to let me announce it on the spot to the regiment. 
'What? here among the cannon-balls? "Yes, marshal, 
among the cannon-balls; it would be more chivalrous.'"

Marbot is, he assures us, "both beloved and valued" 
by his regiment. "On seeing me resume my place at their 
head in spite of my wound, officers and men received 
me with a general cheer, which, as showing the esteem 
and regard which the good fellows had conceived for 
me, touched me deeply."

He has a very exalted sense of honor. During the 
Spanish campaign, when the roads and mountains are 
infested with bandits, he cannot be deterred from his 
duty: "I remarked to the excellent man that my honor 
required me to brave all dangers in order to get to my 
general." Single-handed he saves a Frenchman from being flogged for trying to escape from the Prussians, as a 
result of which Napoleon warns both Prussians and Russians that if any of his soldiers are flogged he will shoot 
all their officers who fall into his hands. After the battle 
of Leipzig a gang of Prussians commence a massacre of 
the unarmed French who are on the run. Marbot sees
this and orders his regiment to exterminate the Prussians. 
"I dreaded lest I might actually find pleasure in killing  
some of the scoundrels with my own hand. So I sheathed 
my sword, and left the task of exterminating the assassins 
to my troopers."

Some of his Spanish experiences, especially his single-handed fight with and escape from five Spanish carabineers, are as thrilling as anything Doyle could devise; 
while his crossing of the torrential Danube by night in 
order to capture an enemy who can give valuable information to Napoleon would have made Dumas lift his 
eyebrows. Occasionally Doyle takes an incident from 
Marbot and changes it for the purpose of his story. At 
Jena, for example, Marbot summons a Saxon hussar to 
surrender at the saber's point. The hussar hands over his  
weapon but Marbot is "generous enough to give it back 
to him," and although by the laws of war his horse belongs to Marbot, his captor does not deprive him of it. 
He thanks Marbot warmly and follows him. "But as soon 
as we were 500 paces from the French chasseurs, the 
confounded Saxon officer, who was on my left, drew 
his sabre, laid open my horse's shoulder, and was on the 
point of striking me had I not thrown myself upon him, 
although I had not my saber in my hand. But as our 
bodies were in contact he had not room to bring his 
blade to bear on me, seeing which he caught me by the 
epaulet — for I was in full uniform that day — and pulled 
hard enough to make me lose my balance. My saddle 
turned round, and there I was with one leg in the air and  
my head downwards, while the Saxon, going off at full 
gallop, returned to what remained of the enemy's army. 
I was furious both at the position in which I found myself and at the ingratitude with which the stranger repaid 
my kind treatment of him. So, as soon as the Saxon army 
was captured, I went to look for my hussar officer and 
give him a good lesson, but he had disappeared." Readers
of Gerard's adventures will recognize this incident, with 
the setting altered and the characters transposed, in the 
story called "How the Brigadier Held the King."

Thus it is clear that Doyle owed something to Marbot, 
just as Shakespeare owed something to Plutarch. Yet 
Doyle rises as much above Marbot in the realm of fancy 
as Shakespeare rises above Plutarch in the realm of the 
imagination. There are touches on almost every page of 
the Gerard stories that make the Brigadier stand out 
with a comic vividness unequaled by his model, who 
to do him justice, did not see himself as a comic character. Meeting an officer whose troop of horsemen are a 
little out of hand, Gerard says, "I gave them a glance 
which stiffened them in their saddles." The officer asks 
him as a personal favor to undertake an adventure. Gerard replied that duty compels him to refuse. The officer 
then admits that there is an element of personal danger 
in the adventure. "It was a crafty thing for him to say," 
remarks Gerard. "Of course I sprang from Rataplan's 
back and ordered the groom to lead him back into the 
stables." When in a ticklish corner, with death staring 
him in the face, he confesses, "I shed tears as I thought 
of the general consternation which my premature end 
would give rise to." A lady presses him to tell her the 
story of his exploits. "Never have I had so delightful a 
conversation," says he. He rides through Rheims with a 
companion whose behavior draws this comment: "In his 
insane conceit he ogled the girls as they waved their 
handkerchiefs to me from the windows." Gerard indulges in a love-affair, remarking: "You will wonder 
why it should be, if this maiden was so beautiful, that I 
should be left without a rival. There was a very good 
reason, my friends, for I so arranged it that my rivals 
were in the hospital." In a particularly tight corner he 
prays for help, "but I am a little out of practice at such 
things, and the only words I could remember were the
prayer for fine weather which we used at the school on 
the evening before holidays." Marshal Berthier tempts 
him to betray the Emperor, and he makes an impassioned 
reply: "I was so moved by my own words and by the 
fine position which I had taken up, that my voice broke, 
and I could hardly refrain from tears." The emotion of 
others moves him too: "When he saw me his little pink 
eyes filled with tears, and, indeed, I could not but shed 
a few myself at the sight of his joy." Massena wishes to 
send him on a dangerous mission, and the scene between 
them opens thus:

"He was nervous and ill at ease, but my bearing seemed to reassure him. It is good to be in contact with brave men.

" 'Colonel Etienne Gerard,' said he, 'I have always heard that you are a very gallant and enterprising officer.'

"It was not for me to confirm such a report, and yet it would be folly to deny it, so I clinked my spurs together and saluted.

" 'You are also an excellent rider.'

"I admitted it.

" 'And the best swordsman in the six brigades of light cavalry.'

"Massena was famous for the accuracy of his information."

Every scene is superbly executed, every character is 
brilliantly etched, and every episode is heightened by a 
humor that ranges from satire to burlesque, the contrast 
between the boastfulness of the protagonist and the humiliating situations in which he sometimes finds himself 
providing much of the fun. The Brigadier is by turns 
shrewd and obtuse; his stupidity is matched by his intrepidity; his brain is slow but his impulses are brilliant; 
he is both Quixote and Panza, a sort of Watsonish 
Holmes, and, with d'Artagnan, the liveliest hero in romantic fiction. The odd thing is that the absurdity of the 
leading character never lessens the excitement of the
narrative: the humor gives reality to the romance. Doyle 
never wrote anything else as good as these tales, which 
welled so spontaneously out of him that their gaiety and 
enthusiasm infect the reader. They have a zest and a 
naturalism that lift them right above his more sober 
historical romances. As with the Holmes saga, our chronicler was not weighed down by the seriousness of his mission.

The English reader will accept a Frenchman as a hero 
so long as he is ridiculous, and Gerard instantly became 
popular. No one can resist a man who is both likeable 
and laughable, and Doyle showed a masterly cunning in 
creating a figure who aroused the reader's admiration, 
won his affection, and flattered his self-esteem. There 
was a demand for more "exploits," and the first of the 
Adventures of Gerard came out in The Strand for August 1902, the remainder appearing monthly from November of that year to May 1903.

Doyle did not place these stories among his highest 
flights of fiction, no doubt because, like those of Holmes, 
they were the natural product of his fancy. He wrote 
them with relative ease, and travail was his watchword.


=== 9. The Man of Action ===

The family spent the summer of '94 at Maloja, but they
were back for the winter at Davos, where in the early
months of '95 Doyle introduced a form of sport which
in after years became the chief pastime of Switzerland,
though there is no evidence that the people who made
fortunes out of it acknowledged his pioneer work with
cash, or even thanks. Having read Nansen's account of
how he had crossed Greenland on skis, Doyle became
interested in the subject and felt that Switzerland would
provide a good skiing ground. Two tradesmen in Davos
named Branger caught his enthusiasm, and they sent to
Norway for skis. Beginners are always popular, and their
early efforts provided the inhabitants with a good deal
of light entertainment. But at the end of a month they
emerged from the comic phase of their development and
went up the Jacobshorn, the flags in Davos dipping in
their honor when they got to the top. The return journey,
though varied by "an occasional cropper," was
exhilarating, and they decided to cross the high pass
between their valley and Arosa, which could only be
reached from Davos in winter by a very tedious and
circuitous railway journey. They had no rope, and, 
knowing nothing, they had to use their wits. The experience was not pleasant and occasionally frightening. "We 
came to an absolute precipice," wrote Doyle, "up which 
no doubt the path zigzags in summer. It was not of course 
perpendicular, but it seemed little removed from it, and 
it had just slope enough to hold the snow. It looked impassable, but the Brangers had picked up a lot in some 
way of their own. They took off their skis, fastened 
them together with a thong, and on this toboggan they 
sat, pushing themselves over the edge, and going down 
amid a tremendous spray of flying snow. When they 
reached safety, they beckoned to me to follow. I had 
done as they did, and was sitting on my skis, preparatory 
to launching myself when a fearsome thing happened, 
for my skis shot from under me, flew down the slope, and 
vanished in huge bounds among the snow-mounds beyond. It was a nasty moment, and the poor Brangers 
stood looking up at me some hundreds of feet below me 
in a dismal state of mind. However, there was no possible 
choice as to what to do, so I did it. I let myself go over 
the edge, and came squattering down, with legs and arms 
extended to check the momentum. A minute later I was 
rolling covered with snow at the feet of my guides, and 
my skis were found some hundreds of yards away, so 
no harm was done after all." In signing the hotel register 
at Arosa, one of the Brangers wrote "Sportesmann" after 
Doyle's name.

Having laid out a golf course Doyle left Davos in the 
early summer of '95 and took his family to Caux, where 
he finished the first Gerard series and began Rodney 
Stone. He had always been fond of boxing, had reveled 
in the history of the prize-ring, and in Rodney Stone his 
enthusiasm and knowledge are apparent. The book did a 
lot to popularize boxing, which was so little esteemed in 
the 'nineties that no one but the creator of Sherlock
Holmes could have persuaded The Strand to serialize a 
novel on that theme. As usual the action episodes are first-rate; and as usual the historical personages are not an 
integral part of the story. Nothing could be better than 
the description of the fights or of the race from Brighton 
to London; but Doyle wanted to reconstruct an age, and 
so Nelson, the Prince Regent, Sheridan, Fox, Beau Brummell, "Junius," Cochrane, Collingwood, Lady Hamilton 
and others, pop in and out of the pages for the sole purpose of creating a "period piece." The author takes us 
round London, shows us the sights, carries us to Watier's, 
remarks on the habits and the manners of the time, and 
provides us with a sort of Who's Who in the sporting 
and social world of the Regency.

He repeated the process in another novel written a 
little later, Uncle Bernac, which is a good "thriller" 
spoiled by the same defect. In the Gerard yarns Napoleon, Wellington and the rest are introduced for a purpose proper to the events in which they take part: they 
influence the life of the hero and forward the story. But 
in Uncle Bernac the tale is held up while Doyle presents 
us with the results of his reading. The two chapters in 
which Napoleon is portrayed are, the author is careful 
to remind us, "the quintessence of a score of books." 
Everyone of note, even the American Robert Fulton 
who is trying to interest Napoleon in steam navigation, 
turns up and bumps into the hero, and while the background is being filled in the foreground fades out.

In the autumn of '95, while on a short visit to England, Doyle heard from Grant Allen that the soil and air 
of Hindhead in Surry had cured him of consumption. 
Doyle did not hesitate for a moment: he went down to 
Hindhead, bought a piece of land, engaged an old 
Southsea friend named Ball as architect, chose a builder, 
dashed back to Caux, and started off with his wife and 
sister to Egypt, where they decided to winter before
settling down in their Surrey home. They stayed at the 
Mena Hotel, close to the Pyramids, about seven miles 
from Cairo. Mrs. Doyle was already much better, and 
they hoped that a few months in Egypt would complete the cure. One of the first things they heard on arrival was that the Sherlock Holmes stories had been translated into Arabic and issued to the local police as a textbook.

Doyle climbed the Great Pyramid once, for the satisfaction of being able to say that he had, and thereafter 
observed with interest the crowds of people enduring the 
discomforts of the ascent so that they might make a 
similar boast. He played golf on the primitive links of 
the Mena Hotel, and found that the graves of the early 
Egyptian monarchs made very effective bunkers. He 
practiced riding, and on one occasion the horse ran away 
with him, pitched him over its head and kicked him in 
the eye, an accident which nearly resulted in the loss of 
it and left him with a slightly drooping eyelid for life. 
He mixed in the diplomatic and military society of 
Cairo, and tried to converse with such natives as he 
came across. "Some men have the gift of pantomime and 
some have not. I know by experience that I have not," 
he once admitted. "On the occasion of the eclipse of the 
moon I endeavored to explain the cause of it to an Arab. 
I pointed to the moon and to the earth. Then I pointed 
to a horse and his shadow. Presently the Arab rose and 
began to examine the horse's hind legs, and I found that 
I had convinced him that the animal was ill. I have given 
up gestures since then."

Early in '96 he took the family up the Nile on one of 
Cook's boats as far as Wady Halfa, visiting so many 
temples on the way that he lost count of them. In those 
days camel-raids to the banks of the river used to be made 
by wild tribesmen from the south; and finding himself 
one day with "a drove of helpless tourists" and an escort
of four Negro soldiers on the rock of Abousir, Doyle 
conjured up a fearsome picture of what would happen 
if a troop of Moslem fanatics were suddenly to appear. 
"It was the strong impression which I there received 
which gave me the idea of taking a group of people of 
different types and working out what the effect of so horrible an experience would be upon each." The result was 
The Tragedy of the Korosko, in which he tells a story as 
well as ever and portrays the various characters with a 
clarity and subtlety unmatched in his other novels. The 
Colonel in particular is lifelike, which shows that Doyle 
had closely observed the English officers in the clubs and 
messes around Cairo. Lacon Watson once said that the 
merit of Doyle's humor "lies in a quick sense of the incongruous, and a simple, straightforward manner of exposing it." There is no better example of this in all his work than the Colonel's speech to the interpreter when the Emir who has captured them threatens to torture the women unless they become Moslems. Hoping for the 
arrival of a rescue party, the Colonel makes his suggestion in order to gain time: "I think I see a way out. See 
here, dragoman! You tell that gray-bearded old devil 
that we know nothing about his cursed tinpot religion. 
Put it smooth when you translate it. Tell him that he 
cannot expect us to adopt it until we know what particular brand of rot it is that he wants us to believe. Tell 
him that if he will instruct us, we are perfectly willing 
to listen to his teaching, and you can add that any creed 
which turns out such beauties as him, and that other 
bounder with the black beard, must claim the attention 
of everyone."

When they returned from their trip up the river Doyle 
accompanied an Egyptian Army officer on a visit to the 
old Coptic monastery by the Salt Lakes some fifty miles 
from Cairo. Most of the journey was done in a gilded 
and fantastically decorated coach which Doyle thought
had come out of a circus but which proved to be the 
coach that had been specially constructed for Napoleon 
III in the belief that he was going to open the Suez Canal. 
In this extraordinary chariot they lumbered across the 
Libyan desert, the officer running a large part of the 
journey in order to keep fit. Darkness came on and a 
storm of rain came down and the driver lost his way. 
Doyle found it by spotting Charles's Wain through a 
gap in the clouds and guessing they were south of the 
track. Then they walked ahead of the coach with lanterns, so as not to lose the track, and came to a tent, 
where a German surveyor pointed the way and said that 
the Monastery was nearby. Off they went, and after losing the track again, and wandering about for an hour or 
more, they saw a light ahead, hailed it with joy, and 
found themselves back with the German surveyor. They 
spent the night in a wooden but and next morning 
reached the Monastery, where their arrival evoked no 
interest. Doyle found the place depressing; no one seemed 
to have anything to do; and several of the monks looked 
debauched; but a livelier atmosphere prevailed when the 
Abbot said he was feeling ill, because Doyle, instead of 
taking this as a delicate hint that the holy man was feeling 
inhospitable, promptly banged him about in a thoroughly 
professional manner and ordered him to take the medicine which would shortly arrive from Cairo. Leaving the 
Abbot to think things over, they returned to headquarters, where they heard that war had been declared in their absence and that the army was advancing on Dongola.

"It is impossible to be near great historical events and not to desire to take part in them, or at the least to observe them," wrote Doyle, who instantly cabled to The Westminster Gazette asking for the appointment of "honorary correspondent pro tern," and getting it by return. A glimpse of some tommies poking their heads
through the window of a troop-train leaving for the 
front prompted him to write a passage which reflected 
his own emotion: "Look at those eight bullet heads, close  
cropped and red-eared, with flushed bruiser faces and 
gap-toothed mouths, howling in chorus. They are not 
beautiful, certainly, and it would be hard to deny that 
they are brutal, but what a sense of vigorous high-blooded animalism they leave behind them."

Hurriedly collecting his kit, he started up the river 
with several junior officers, getting as far as Assouan, 
where they were stranded for a week. Doyle, with his 
eager emotional nature, was surprised by the casual bearing of his companions, who might have been enjoying a 
Cook's Tour instead of taking part in a campaign. "Only 
once did I see them really excited. I had returned to the  
hotel which was the general headquarters, and as I entered the hall I saw a crowd of them all clustering round  
the notice-board to read a telegram which had just been 
suspended. They were on the toes of their spurred boots, 
with their necks outstretched and every sign of quivering and eager interest. `Ah,' thought I, 'at last we have  
got through the hide of these impenetrable men. I suppose the Khalifa is coming down, horse, foot, and artillery, and that we are on the eve of battle.' I pushed my way in, and thrust my head among all the bobbing sun-helmets. It was the account of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race."

At Assouan Doyle joined up with the other war correspondents, and they decided to trek south on their own,  
though they were advised to travel with a force of 
Egyptian cavalry for safety. Mounted on camels they set 
out for Korosko with a small army of servants, doing their 
longest marches before and just after dawn. "I am still 
haunted by that purple velvet sky," wrote Doyle nearly 
thirty years later, "by those enormous and innumerable 
stars, by the half-moon which moved slowly above us,
while our camels with their noiseless tread seemed to 
bear us without effort through a wonderful dream 
world." The dream world turned to reality when his 
camel spotted some green stuff on the track and went 
on its knees to eat it, for Doyle did a rapid slide down 
its neck, head first, and felt rather surprised on reaching 
the earth. Tarantulas, lizards and snakes were also not 
part of the dream world; and once the sight of a fierce 
Nubian warrior, streaking past their camp in the dawn, 
was sufficiently alarming to inspire Doyle with a short 
story, "The Three Correspondents." From Korosko they 
went by water to Wady Halfa, where Kitchener asked 
him to dinner and told him that nothing exciting would 
happen for months. All the same he camel-trekked to 
Sarras, the last British post, and thought it "wonderful to 
look south and to see the distant peaks said to be in Dongola, with nothing but savagery and murder lying between." Presenting his camel to the army, he returned by a cargo boat, eating tinned apricots and reading Rousseau's Confessions all the way, and getting so heartily sick of both that he never wished to see a tinned apricot 
or to glance at Rousseau for the rest of his life. Already, 
at the end of April, the heat was too much for his wife, 
so they left Egypt at once; and on May ist Doyle was a 
guest at the Royal Academy Banquet, noting on his 
wrists "the ragged little ulcers where the poisonous jiggers which had burrowed into my skin while I lay upon the banks of the Nile were hatching out their eggs under the august roof of Burlington House."

The "considerable mansion" he had planned at Hindhead was too considerable to be ready for them, so they 
took a furnished house in Haslemere for a year, then 
went to a boarding-house called Moorlands in order to 
be near the new residence, into which they moved in 
June '97. He called it "Undershaw" because "it stood 
under a hanging grove of trees." Apart from his wife's
health, life was very pleasant for him: he wrote assiduously and rode vigorously. The Central News asked him 
to act as their special correspondent in the event of a 
European war, and he took riding-lessons in a Knights-bridge school. "There will be a European war one of these days," said he, "and when there is I want to be in it, if only as a correspondent." Meanwhile, failing larger game, there was a lot of fun to be got out of fox-hunting.

Having completed Uncle Bernac, Korosko, and several 
short stories of a rather gruesome nature, he decided to 
reveal another side of himself. It is more than likely that 
his wife was responsible for the subject-matter and the 
handling of his next book: her nerves may have been 
jarred by the neck-twisting episode in Bernac. "I wish 
you'd write something that will make people realize 
what a treasure you are at home," one can fancy her saying to him. "Your stirring romances and sometimes 
rather horrifying scenes give your readers such a wrong 
impression of you." Accordingly he produced A Duet, 
which contains some memories of the days when they 
were engaged, a knowledge of cooking and women's 
clothes which is surprising, and much information about 
certain historical figures which is not surprising. In the 
character of the hero Doyle quite consciously described 
himself, for he loved to picture himself as a sort of battleground in which the forces of good and evil perpetually 
strove: "Strength, virility, emotional force, power of 
deep feeling — these are traits which have to be paid for. 
There was sometimes just a touch of the savage, or at 
least there were indications of the possibility of a touch 
of the savage, in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the 
open air and of physical exercise was a sign of it. He left 
upon women the impression, not altogether unwelcome, 
that there were unexplored recesses of his nature to 
which the most intimate of them had never penetrated. 
In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found him dull. Perhaps it would have been better for him if they had, for his impulsive nature 
had never been long content with a chilly friendship." 
Like all relatively simple men, Doyle believed his nature 
to be inextricably complex.

The saint v. sinner theme occurs again in a poem he wrote about 
himself called "The Inner Room," wherein he pictures Conan Doyles 
of all sorts, heroic and villainous, anxious to assume control of his 
soul:

There are others who are sitting,<br />
Grim as doom,<br />
In the dim ill-boding shadow<br />
Of my room.<br />
Darkling figures, stern or quaint,<br />
Now a savage, now a saint,<br />
Showing fitfully and faint<br />
Through the gloom.

And those shadows are so dense, <br />
There may be<br />
Many — very many — more<br />
Than I see.<br />
They are sitting day and night <br />
Soldier, rogue, and anchorite; <br />
And they wrangle and they fight<br />
Over me.

As he had written something altogether unlike his usual work, he thought it the best thing he had done, and evinced some anxiety as to the advance orders from shops and libraries. His publisher, Grant Richards, sent him bulletins, from which he learnt that Simpkins did not "take kindly" to the book, that Mudies had only ordered 780 copies before publication, that Smiths, who had sold 3000 of Rodney Stone, were contenting themselves with 1300; and although it was pleasant to hear that "a young lady of rather special intelligence... did not know when she had put down a book with greater reluctance," it was not so comforting to be informed that the book-seller who had shown her the work would not order a large number because "special intelligence" had added that it was "too pure and good to attract the multitude." When it came out Doyle showed more sensitiveness to criticism than was usual with him; though in this case he had a real cause for grievance, because a Nonconformist named Robertson Nicoll criticized him adversely, either anonymously or pseudonymously, in half a dozen publications. From the Reform Club the indignant author fired off a letter to the Daily Chronicle, in which he complained that "what to the uninitiated might seem to be a general burst of praise or blame may really when analyzed prove to be the work of a single individual." To put an end to such a "pernicious system," he said that "a combination of authors who are opposed to wire-pulling and pluralism" should see to it that their works were not advertised in the peccant journals, "and literary papers are dependent upon advertising." The drawback to his scheme was that the authors who found favor with Robertson Nicoll could not be induced to support it; and the pernicious system still is, or was until [https://www.hitler-archive.org Hitler] interfered with the paper supply, in good running order.

Whether A Duet was the cause or the effect we cannot say, but Doyle was passing through a phase of pacifism round about this period. The Tsar of Russia had recently invited the powers to a Peace Conference at The Hague, and meetings were being held all over Europe in support of his proposal to limit armaments and to establish an international tribunal. Doyle was all in favor of the Conference, took the chair at a Hindhead meeting towards the end of January '99 and spoke enthusiastically about the Tsar's move. To his amazement a neighbor on Hindhead who had come to support him then delivered himself as follows: "All the statesmen of Europe, the very men who are now ordering torpedo boats, are also expressing approval of the Tsar's Rescript. Every one knows that if the French submarine boats are a success, this country will at once order them, Germany will order them, and the Tsar himself will not have the power to prevent Russia from ordering them. No good will be done by repeating the platitudes which we put on our Christmas cards every year. We must face the situation by making a sharp distinction between two sets of proposals now before the world. One of these is that war should be made less terrible than it is at present. But I cannot too strongly insist that it is not armaments or ironclads that fight, but men, and that if we do away with all the weapons of war and reduce men to the aboriginal weapons of their fists, teeth, and claws, they will fight just as horribly." By this time the pacifists were getting a bit jumpy, but as the speaker went on to say that he supported the second proposal, viz. the establishment of an international tribunal to which public opinion would force nations to bring their quarrels before resorting to the arbitrament of arms, the audience calmed down. The speaker was Bernard Shaw, who used sometimes to visit Doyle when they both lived on Hindhead. "We were on pleasant terms," Shaw told me, "and I converted him from Christmas-card Pacifism to rampant Jingoism — overdid it in fact." But this is questionable. Doyle felt as the average man feels. He was a Christmas-card pacifist at Christmas-time, becoming bellicose the moment the bugles rang out.

Before the end of the year he had forgotten all about 
the Tsar in his desire to fight Kruger, who declared war 
on Great Britain in October. Being a nation of Christmas-card pacifists, Great Britain was as usual unprepared, 
and in December suffered a series of reverses. But being 
bellicose when aroused, the country settled down to the 
job of beating the Boers. At a cricketers' smoking concert early in the war Doyle said: "If ever England gets 
into a hole, you may depend on it that her sporting men 
will pull her out of it." That indeed was the least they 
could do since they had helped to get her into it, the 
nation's preoccupation with sport keeping its mind off
the muddle and corruption of politics. Like his fellow-Briton, Doyle had a sportsman's attitude to war. "One 
subject which always aroused his enthusiastic interest," 
Frances Gribble informed me, "was any movement to 
promote any sort of entente with 'our friend, the 
enemy,' whoever the enemy might be. His account of 
his experiences in the Boer War was full of praise for the 
sportsmanlike qualities of his opponents, and his dominating thought seemed to be: 'What a splendid entente we 
shall be able to have when we're tired of fighting.' I 
once said that when proposing his health at a public dinner over which he had presided; and he came up afterwards and thanked me, telling me that that was just what he liked people to say and think about him."

After the "black week" of December '99 Doyle tried 
to enlist in the Middlesex Yeomanry, but before his application was considered a friend of his, John Langman, 
who was sending a hospital unit to South Africa, asked 
him to go with it both as a doctor and as a general but 
unofficial supervisor. He agreed, and spent a week choosing the personnel. The War Office insisted that they 
should have a military chief, an Irishman named Major 
Drury, who caused a lot of trouble later on; but as he 
was amusing, and said that his sole object in life was to  
leave the service and marry a rich widow with a cough, 
Doyle tolerated him. The unit consisted of fifty men and 
fifty beds; and Langman footed the entire bill, Doyle 
alone receiving nothing for his services, but contributing 
his butler to the enterprise and paying his salary.

While waiting to embark Doyle experimented with a 
rifle, anxious to devise a method whereby men who were 
concealed behind rocks could be killed with dropping 
bullets. After nearly murdering someone near Frensham 
Pond, he abandoned the experiments. Naturally he wrote 
to the War Office about his method, but nothing short 
of dynamite can move the War Office; and he wrote to
The Times to complain of the War Office, but he might 
have saved himself the trouble; and then, having sent his 
wife to Naples for her health, and having been inspected 
by the Duke of Cambridge, who nearly died of apoplexy 
because the hospital tunic buttons carried no distinguishing mark, he sailed for South Africa on February 27th, 1900.

It was characteristic of Doyle that one of the first 
things he did on landing at Cape Town was to visit the 
Boer prisoners and distribute among them some money 
which had been given him in London "for charitable 
purposes." The news from the front was good. Lord 
Roberts had reached Bloemfontein, Cronje had been 
rounded up, Kimberley relieved, and the railway journey 
across the veld was more exhilarating than dangerous. 
As he saw the camp-fires, and heard the answers yelled 
by the troops in the train to the questions shouted by the 
troops along the line, Doyle was enraptured by the atmosphere of war. "When the millennium comes the 
world will gain much, but it will lose its greatest thrill," 
he reflected. In the early morning of April 2nd he 
reached Bloemfontein and was soon enveloped by an 
atmosphere that was still warlike but less uplifting. An 
appalling outbreak of enteric among the troops was 
caused by the simple fact that Lord Roberts had failed 
to take the waterworks (only 20 miles off) when he occupied the capital, an oversight of which the Boers took 
advantage by cutting the supply. Apparently he felt that 
the troops required rest after their exertions; so they 
drank water from the old wells of Bloemfontein and 
rested there, some 5000 of them forever.

The Langman unit camped on the cricket-field, using 
the pavilion as chief ward, and for a month they "lived 
in the midst of death — and death in its vilest, filthiest 
form. Our accommodation was for fifty patients, but 120 
were precipitated upon us, and the floor was littered between the beds with sick and often dying men. Our linen and utensils were never calculated for such a number, and as the nature of the disease causes constant pollution of the most dangerous character and with the 
vilest effluvia, one can imagine how dreadful was the 
situation. The worst surgical ward after a battle would 
be a clean place compared to that pavilion. At one end 
was a stage with the scene set for 'H.M.S. Pinafore.' 
This was turned into latrines for those who could stagger 
so far. The rest did the best they could, and we did the 
best we could in turn. But a Verestschagin would have 
found a subject in that awful ward, with the rows of 
emaciated men, and the silly childish stage looking down 
upon it all... Four weeks may seem a short time in comfort, but it is a very long one under conditions such as 
those, amid horrible sights and sounds and smells, while 
a haze of flies spreads over everything, covering your 
food and trying to force themselves into your mouth — 
every one of them a focus of disease. It was bad enough 
when we had a full staff, but soon the men began to wilt 
under the strain. They were nearly all from the Lancashire cotton mills, little, ill-nourished fellows but with a 
great spirit. Of the fifteen twelve contracted the disease 
and added to the labors of the survivors. Three died...  
Our hospital was no worse off than the others, and as 
there were many of them the general condition of the 
town was very bad. Coffins were out of the question, 
and the men were lowered in their brown blankets into 
shallow graves at the average rate of sixty a day. A sickening smell came from the stricken town. Once when I 
had ridden out to get an hour or two of change, and was 
at least six miles from the town, the wind changed and 
the smell was all around me. You could smell Bloemfontein long before you could see it."

Doyle cured one case by breaking a medical law and 
giving a square meal to a patient who was obviously
dying and kept begging for food. "Do you consider that 
this man is sure to die?" he asked the surgeon, Charles 
Gibbs. "He is certainly as bad as he can be," said Gibbs. 
"Well then, I propose to give him a solid meal," said 
Doyle. The other was shocked and shook his head: "It 
is a great responsibility you take." "What's the odds, if 
he has to die anyhow?" returned Doyle. "Well, it's just 
the difference whether you kill him or the disease does," 
he was told. "I'll take the chance," said Doyle. He did 
so, the man recovered, and "science" lost another victim.

At last the army continued the march to Pretoria, the 
waterworks were taken with no resistance, and the 
conditions at the hospital improved so much that Doyle 
rode off to see a little fighting, being away with the 
army from the 1st to the 7th of May. We need not accompany him, though we may note that he was present 
at the capture of Brandfort, that he remained under fire 
during a two-hour artillery duel, and that he witnessed 
the looting of a farm, when the death of a pig shook him: 
"A fat white pig all smothered in blood runs past. A 
soldier meets it, his bayonet at the charge. He lunges and  
lunges again, and the pig screams horribly. I had rather 
see a man killed." He left the army to pursue its way 
and returned to duty, camping cheerfully on the veld 
and writing a private memorandum: "I felt happy because I had always wanted a baptism of fire and now I 
had had a fairly good one. As far as I could judge my 
own sensations I felt no nervousness at all — or at least far 
less than I should have expected — but my mind kept turning on other things all the time. For example I was so 
annoyed at the loss of my haversack that I really for 
some time forgot about the shells altogether as I bustled 
about looking for it. I think I was under fire about two 
hours. At the same time I could not have been as perfectly motionless as the Gunners — it was a wonderful exhibition of nerve."

When he got back he found that Major Drury and the 
staff were at loggerheads, and he had to nip a mutiny in 
the bud. Then he fell ill himself, an illness that was aggravated by the buckling of two ribs in one of the football matches he had organized to keep the men's minds off enteric. With the capture of Pretoria he considered that his work was done, and as he had two jobs of his 
own on hand, a history of the war to write and a political 
election to fight, he determined to leave for England. 
Before going he visited Pretoria, interviewed Lord Roberts, obtained a number of first-hand accounts of the campaign for his book, and went down a gold mine at Johannesburg, receiving "the usual tips as to which mines  were going to boom — on all of which I acted, and all of 
which proved to be wrong." After a visit to Sir Alfred 
Milner, he sailed for England on July 11th. The boat was  
packed with peers of the realm, whose presence did not 
prevent Doyle from telling a foreign officer that he was a 
liar for saying that the British had habitually used dum-dum bullets. The officer wrote an apology, and Doyle abated his fury.

Her stay in Naples had benefited Mrs. Doyle, and 
they were able to settle down once more on Hindhead, 
where Doyle set to work on his History of the Boer 
War, an eminently fair record of the business, and probably the best. But what gave him greater satisfaction than 
the completion of the History was a pamphlet he wrote 
in nine days entitled The Cause and Conduct of the 
War in South Africa, which was inspired by the hostility 
to England then being expressed all over Europe. For 
once in a way France and Germany were in complete 
agreement, and the other countries joined the chorus of 
abuse. A firm belief in the iniquity of England and the
barbarity of British soldiers cemented countries otherwise at variance. Not having had an opportunity then of showing what she could do when let loose, Germany was especially bitter; but nearly all the continental countries were anti-English, some of them violently so.

Early in 1902 Doyle set to work to check this feeling 
by expounding his country's case and exposing the current lies about the brutalities of her soldiers. He made 
an appeal in The Times for funds, got a publishing firm 
to assist the enterprise, obtained private subscriptions, 
made arrangements for translations, and produced a 
pamphlet which was sold for sixpence in Great Britain 
and distributed free throughout Europe. The sale in England and America brought in about £2500, and as the 
subscriptions came to much the same sum there was more 
than enough to cover the continental editions, the balance being used for various worthy purposes.

Doyle's pamphlet had a steadying effect on European opinion, and his reward followed quickly, for in 1902 he was created a knight and appointed Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey.


=== 10. Titanic ===

Like so many people before and after him, Doyle thought 
that he ought to do something about the human race — 
or, as he put it, "one likes to feel that one has some small 
practical influence upon the affairs of one's time" — 
and it never occurred to him, after he had done something about it, that he might have done better if he had 
left ill alone. His first attempt to improve his fellow-beings was made at his home town, when he stood for 
Parliament as a Liberal-Unionist candidate for Central 
Edinburgh in the "khaki" election of 1900. He was given 
the chance of several "safe" constituencies, but being a 
fighter he rejected them, preferring to attack one of the 
chief radical strongholds in the country. His main object 
was to fortify the Government in its job of beating the 
Boers, and when his committee drafted his election address he asked them who was going to honor the promises they had made in it. "Why, you, of course," they replied. "Then I think it would be better if I made them," said Doyle, who threw their draft into the waste-paper 
basket and wrote his own address. He entered with ardor 
into the campaign, but he was too honest for a politician
and alienated the large Irish vote by pleading for a Catholic University in Dublin, which annoyed the Protestant 
northerners, and by withholding his support for Home 
Rule, which antagonized the Catholic southerners. "This 
united Ireland, North and South, for the first time in 
history," he declared. Still he was doing pretty well 
until an evangelical parson named Jacob Primmer covered the constituency with posters which stated that 
Doyle was a Roman Catholic, having been educated by 
the Jesuits, and that he was hostile to the Scottish Kirk 
and Covenant, because "once a Jesuit always a Jesuit," 
and so on and so forth. This decided the issue. There was 
no time to reply, the election being next day, and Doyle 
lost the seat by a few hundred votes.

He made one more attempt to enter Parliament, as 
Tariff Reform candidate for the Border Burghs in 1905. 
He had not a chance of winning; for although it was 
obvious that the woolen industry of Hawick, Galashiel, 
and Selkirk had been badly hit by German competition, 
the doctrine of Free Trade was almost a religion in Scotland, and Doyle was subjected to such a barrage of questions and facetiae that his temper was severely strained. 
However, he held himself in check until the last moment, when, as luck would have it, one of his supporters 
got what was meant for his hecklers. He was standing 
on the platform waiting for the London train when a 
young enthusiast, brimming with kindly thoughts and 
burning with zeal, seized his hand and crushed it in a 
grip that was meant to be heartening. "It opened the 
sluice," Doyle confessed, "and out came a torrent of 
whaler language which I had hoped that I had long ago 
forgotten. The blast seemed to blow him bodily across 
the platform, and formed a strange farewell to my supporters."

He was asked to stand for Parliament on severallater 
occasions, but declined, and for the rest of his life tried to 
influence the affairs of his time in a more direct way. For 
example: he founded the Undershaw Rifle Club, model 
and pioneer of the miniature rifle-ranges that sprang up 
all over the country, their value becoming apparent in 
the 1914-18 war; he advocated the Channel Tunnel (or 
tunnels), the lack of which was severely felt in the same 
war; he became President of the Crowborough and District Boy Scouts Association; for ten years he was President of the Divorce Law Reform Union; he worked for two years with E. D. Morel on the Congo Association, speaking of the atrocities up and down the country and 
producing a book, The Crime of the Congo, which had 
such an effect on public opinion that the Belgian government was forced to make life easier for the natives; in 
fact he could always be depended upon to fight for the 
underdog, and at a much later period in his life we find 
him taking up the cause of the chambermaids at the 
Metropole Hotel, Brighton, whose salaries were being 
reduced. "The duty which we owe to the weak overrides all other duties and is superior to all circumstances," 
wrote Doyle in Micah Clarke. He certainly recognized 
this duty more clearly than any man of his time. Many 
people will fight for humanity and become martyrs for 
abstract causes; but Doyle had the far rarer virtue of 
fighting for individual human beings, and courting ridicule for his eccentricity. Two instances stand out in his career and must be mentioned.

In the early years of the present century the vicar of 
Great Wyrley in Staffordshire was a Parsi named 
Edalji, who had married an Englishwoman. They had a 
son and daughter. The family was not popular in the 
neighborhood, perhaps because the villagers felt that they 
could learn nothing about Christianity from a Parsi, and 
anonymous letters of a menacing and scurrilous nature 
constantly arrived at the vicarage. At the same time an 
epidemic of horse-maiming broke out in the district, and
the authorities were violently criticized for not taking 
steps to catch the criminal. At length the police managed to link up the writer of anonymous letters with the 
maimer of horses, some references to the crimes having 
appeared in the letters, and in a manner peculiar to the 
police when they wish to silence criticism they managed to identify the writer and maimer with the vicar's 
son, George Edalji, who was arrested, tried, and condemned to seven years penal servitude in 1903. The case 
had been thoroughly "cooked" by the police, and the 
verdict was so manifestly unjust that some folk protested 
and an agitation was kept going in Truth; but young 
Edalji would have finished his sentence and left prison a 
ruined man if Conan Doyle had not, in 1906, casually 
glanced through a paper called The Umpire and read the 
victim's statement of his own case, every word of which rang true.

Instantly putting everything else aside, Doyle gave his 
whole attention to the matter, studied the reports of the 
trial, interviewed the Edalji family, and examined the 
scene of the crimes. He discovered among other things 
that George Edalji, a law student who had written a book 
on Railway Law, held an unblemished record from his 
schooldays, that his employer, a Birmingham solicitor, 
had nothing but praise for him, that he had won the highest honors in his legal classes, that he was a total abstainer, 
had never shown the least sign of cruelty, was of a 
quiet, studious, rational disposition, and so blind that he 
could not recognize anyone six yards off. This last point 
was conclusive because, in order to commit the horrible 
crimes of which he had been accused, the young man 
would have had to cross a large expanse of railway lines, 
force several hedges, struggle through wires, and negotiate many other obstacles, all in the dark, to say nothing 
of leaving his bedroom which he shared with his father,
who was a light sleeper, always locked the door, and had 
sworn that his son never left the room during the night.

Doyle wrote a series of articles on the case which were published in the Daily Telegraph (January 1907) and caused such a sensation that the Government appointed a committee to examine the evidence. Committees are usually addle-headed and this one was well up to form; it cleared Edalji of the crimes, but as it stuck to the theory that he had written the anonymous letters it refused him compensation on the ground that he had contributed to the miscarriage of justice. Although Edalji was instantly set free and the Law Society readmitted him to the roll of solicitors, he never got a farthing's compensation for serving more than three years' imprisonment for something he had not done, and with the £300 raised by the Daily Telegraph he repaid an aunt who had financed his defense.

As a result of his investigations Doyle was able to prove conclusively that the letters had been written and the horses maimed by a certain local man, a habitual criminal, and he placed the evidence in the hands of the authorities. Whereupon the Home Secretary, Lord Gladstone, proved as conclusively that he was the head of a Government office by refusing to accept the facts that were staring him in the face, e.g. that the criminal had 
shown a horse-lancet to someone with the remark that it had done the maiming, that he had been trained in the 
slaughter-yard and was an expert at butchery, that he had frequently written anonymous letters, that his handwriting and his brother's corresponded with that of the letters in the case, that he was periodically off his head, that when he was away the letters and crimes ceased, beginning again when he returned, whereas the outrages continued when Edalji was in jail; and so on. Doyle thought that the Home Office bureaucrats were insane to ignore the evidence he had placed in their hands; but in expecting reason and justice from bureaucrats his own sanity 
was open to doubt.

Two years later he was involved in another mystery, 
but this time he was up against not so much the stupidity 
as the iniquity of the authorities. Having been successful 
in his efforts on behalf of Edalji he was pestered with 
so many requests to prove condemned men innocent that 
he went into the Oscar Slater case with much reluctance, 
but at last, at the instigation of several people, he studied 
it, and came to the conclusion that it was a more monstrous perversion of justice even than Edalji's.

On December 21st, 1908, a man entered the Glasgow 
flat of an elderly woman, Miss Gilchrist, battered her 
head in with a blunt instrument, searched among some 
documents which he left scattered about, stole nothing 
except (possibly) a diamond brooch, and on emerging 
from the flat passed the murdered woman's servant, Helen 
Lambie, who had been out to buy a newspaper, and the 
occupant of the flat beneath, Mr. Adams, who had 
rushed up on hearing three knocks, a signal that Miss Gilchrist wanted his assistance.

Glasgow was agreeably horrified, and detectives set 
about the business of fixing the murderer. A German 
Jew named Oscar Slater, who was "known to the police," 
left Glasgow for New York a few days after the crime. 
Suspicious, thought the police. He had actually embarked 
under an assumed name. Highly suspicious, thought the 
police. Before leaving he had pawned a diamond brooch. 
A clincher, thought the police. And even though they 
soon discovered that the brooch had belonged to Slater, 
they applied for extradition, and, after carefully coaching a number of witnesses, sent them to New York in 
order to identify Slater. Here we must note a few curious 
features. The police knew on December 26th that the 
pawned brooch was Slater's own, yet the cable to arrest
him was not despatched until the 29th, and on arrival at 
New York he was searched for a diamond brooch pawn-ticket. At the outset therefore the police managed, by 
misrepresentation, to create an atmosphere of guilt around 
Slater. Of the three witnesses who might have identified 
Slater as the murderer, Adams was short-sighted and 
would not swear to anyone, Helen Lambie, after some 
hesitation and evasion, said that Slater was the man, and 
a girl of fourteen named Barrowman, who was in the 
street at the time and saw someone run out of the flat 
entry, declared at first that he was like Slater and at last 
that he was Slater, though she had only caught a fleeting 
glimpse of him under the lamplight. At the trial Lambie 
and Barrowman, who occupied the same cabin on their 
way to America, swore that they had never once discussed the object of their trip, a statement which should have cast some doubt on their reliability as witnesses.

Before the extradition proceedings were completed 
Slater announced his willingness to return, and his trial 
took place at Edinburgh in May 1909. The brooch 
clue having failed them, the police had to trump up another. Nothing easier. Slater had a tin-tack hammer. True 
there were no stains on it, nor on any of the man's suits, 
but after all the absence of stains merely proved the cunning and foresight of the criminal. Slater was able to 
prove an alibi, but one of the witnesses was his mistress, 
who of course was considered untrustworthy and whose 
mere existence emphasized his guilt in the eyes of the 
moral community. A witness named McBrayne, whose 
evidence would have been favorable to Slater, was suppressed by the police, who kept the Defense in the dark 
about him. The trial was a hopelessly one-sided affair. No 
attempt was made to prove that Slater had any connection with Miss Gilchrist or her maid; but the Defense 
made nothing of this and against Slater's advice failed to 
put him in the box. The Advocate-General, in a forensic
frenzy, uttered innumerable statements that were quite 
untrue, but the Judge did not once pull him up, and the 
Jury decided against Slater, nine being for guilty, one for 
not guilty, and five for non-proven. He was condemned 
to death; but there was an immediate agitation for a reprieve, and two days before the execution his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

Doyle's conviction of Slater's innocence, reinforced by 
the opinions of Sir Herbert Stephens and Sir E. Marshall 
Hall, both of whom said that there was not a prima facie 
case against him, resulted in a press campaign and a book, 
which forced the Government's hand, and in 1914 a 
Commissioner (Sheriff Miller) was appointed to go into 
the question. As the conduct of the police in framing up 
the charge was ruled out, and as no evidence was given 
on oath, the Commissioner was conveniently able to announce that there were no grounds for interfering with 
the sentence. But not wishing to lag behind the police in 
his attention to duty, Sheriff Miller managed to provide 
another scapegoat. A rising young Glasgow detective, 
Lieut. Trench, believed Slater to be innocent, and said 
that on the night of the murder Helen Lambie had 
mentioned another man as the criminal. He was bullied 
and sneered at by the Sheriff, who rejected his story, 
and shortly afterwards he was dismissed from the police 
force without a pension. Later he was arrested on a criminal but purely fictitious charge, which fortunately was 
dismissed with contempt by the Judge (Scott Dickson) 
before whom it came. The persecution to which Trench 
had been subjected shortened his life. But one important 
fact emerged while the Commissioner was sitting. It was 
stated at the trial that Slater had registered under a false 
name at a Liverpool hotel with the intention of covering 
his tracks. Now it was shown that he had signed his 
own name, although he had embarked under a different
one in order, he confessed, to make a clean start in America.

After the Commissioner's report it looked as if the 
case were settled for good, but every new Secretary for 
Scotland was badgered by Doyle to examine it afresh. 
Nothing happened until Slater was released in 1927, having spent eighteen years at Peterhead prison. Stimulated 
anew by a book of the evidence compiled by a Glasgow 
journalist named William Park, who had steadily refused 
to accept the verdict against Slater, Doyle again agitated 
in the press for a re-trial. The Scottish Secretary, Sir John 
Gilmour, yielded to pressure, and the Court of Criminal 
Appeal, consisting of five judges, heard the case. By this 
time several new facts had come to light. Helen Lambie 
had confessed to the reporter of a newspaper that she 
had recognized the murderer, who was not Slater, and 
that she had been persuaded by the police to make her 
false statement, for which she had received £40. Also the 
woman Barrowman had admitted that she was never 
certain of Slater, that her statement was prompted by the 
officials, and that she had been coached in it fifteen times 
by the Procurator-Fiscal. Her reward was £100. On 
July 20oth, 1928, Slater's sentence was quashed, and he 
was awarded £6000 compensation. Doyle saw him for 
the first time in the courtroom during the hearing, 
leaned across the benches, shook his hand, and said, "Hullo, Slater!"

Unfortunately their communication did not stop there. 
The Government declined to contribute towards the 
costs of the trial, some of which were met by the Jewish 
fraternity; but Doyle, having engineered the appeal, had 
made himself legally responsible for the balance of some 
hundreds of pounds and considered that Slater should 
refund this out of the money he had received. Slater on 
the other hand thought that the Government was responsible, and as the Government thought otherwise 
there was considerable friction between Doyle and Slater 
as to which of them should pay the piper. "It was a 
painful and sordid aftermath to such a story," wrote 
Doyle. He was much hurt by the other's ingratitude, and 
when someone remarked, in mitigation of Slater's behavior, that he had endured a great deal, Doyle replied, "Yes, but he is passing it along." Eventually Doyle carried his point.

One more of his controversies is worth recording because it shows him from a different angle and has a certain historical interest of its own. Just as he voiced the sporting instinct of the average man who rushes to the rescue of the defenseless, so did he share and express the emotions of the ordinary citizen who responds to the picturesque and sentimental appeal of tragic events. In the duel between himself and Bernard Shaw over the sinking of the Titanic, the two types of Irishmen are revealed to us: the one impulsive, serious, romantic, Catholic; the other logical, satirical, realistic, Protestant.

The White Star liner Titanic (46,328 tons) with 2201 
persons on board left Southampton on Wednesday, April 
loth, 1912, called at Cherbourg and Queenstown, and 
sailed from the latter during the afternoon of the 11th 
on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. The managing 
director of the Company, Mr. Ismay, was on board, and 
the passage was made at high speed: about twenty-two 
and a half knots. In the course of Sunday the 14th four 
wireless messages were received from other boats reporting the existence of icebergs in the region through which 
the Titanic was traveling. None of these messages had 
the least effect on the navigation of the vessel, which was 
kept on its course without a reduction of speed. Herein 
the master, Captain Smith, was doing what many others 
had done. It was the general practice when in the vicinity
of ice to keep the course, to maintain the speed, and to 
trust to a sharp look-out. The public expected quick passage; there was competition between the Transatlantic 
services; and up to date there had been no casualties. 
From 6 P.M. on Sunday evening the weather was fine and 
clear: the night was cloudless, moonless, star-lit. Just 
before ti:40 P.M. one of the look-outs in the crow's nest  
struck three blows on the gong and telephoned the 
bridge "Iceberg right ahead." Almost simultaneously the 
officer of the watch gave the order "Hard-a-starboard" 
and telegraphed the engine-room "Stop. Full speed 
astern." But the iceberg was sighted at a distance of only 
500 yards; and although the helm was already "hard 
over" and the ship had fallen about two points to port, 
she struck the berg forward on the starboard side.

About midnight it was realized that she would sink, and 
the order was given to uncover the fourteen boats. Unfortunately there had been neither boat-muster nor boat-drill, and though members of the crew had received printed lists in which they could find the boats assigned  to them, many of them had not troubled to look at the lists and did not know their boats. Consequently there 
were confusion and delay in getting them ready, made 
worse by the deafening screech of the escaping steam. 
Meanwhile stewards were rousing passengers, helping 
them to put on lifebelts, and getting them up to the boat  
deck. At about 12:30 the order was given to place the 
women and children in the boats. Many women refused 
to go, some because they would not leave their husbands; 
they did not realize that the danger was imminent and in 
any case they had heard that the Carpathia was on her 
way to the scene. Faulty organization and panic resulted 
in many of the lifeboats leaving the ship less than half 
full, and though the sea was smooth few attempts were 
made by the crews of the lifeboats to save those struggling in the water after the ship had foundered. The Captain and four officers went down with the ship at 2:20 A.M., and only 711 persons were saved.

The English newspapers wrote up the story, and on May 14th, under the heading "Some Unmentioned Morals," Bernard Shaw wrote down the English newspapers in the Daily News and Leader:

"Why is it that the effect of a sensational catastrophe 
on a modern nation is to cast it into transports, not of 
weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the bereaved nor congratulation of the rescued, not of poetic expression of the soul purified by pity and terror, but of a wild defiance of inexorable Fate and undeniable Fact a wild defiance of inexorable Fate and undeniable Fact by an explosion of outrageous romantic lying?

"What is the first demand of romance in a shipwreck? 
It is the cry of Women and Children first. No male creature is to step into a boat as long as there is a woman or child on the doomed ship. How the boat is to be navigated and rowed by babies and women occupied in holding the babies is not mentioned. The likelihood that 
no sensible woman would trust either herself or her 
child in a boat unless there was a considerable percentage  
of men on board is not considered. Women and Children first: that is the romantic formula. And never did the chorus of solemn delight at the strict observance of this formula by the British heroes on board the Titanic rise to sublimer strains than in the papers containing the  
first account of the wreck by a surviving eye-witness, 
Lady Duff Gordon. She described how she escaped in the 
captain's boat. There was one other woman in it, and 
ten men: twelve all told. One woman for every five men. 
Chorus: 'Not once or twice in our rough island story,' etc. etc.

"Second romantic demand. Though all the men (except the foreigners, who must all be shot by stern British officers in attempting to rush the boats over the bodies of the women and children) must be heroes, the Captain must be a super-hero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, 
delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee 
that the wreck was nobody's fault, but, on the contrary, 
a triumph of British navigation.

"Such a man Captain Smith was enthusiastically proclaimed on the day when it was reported (and actually 
believed, apparently) that he had shot himself on the 
bridge, or shot the first officer, or been shot by the first 
officer, or shot anyhow to bring the curtain down effectively. Writers who had never heard of Captain Smith 
to that hour wrote of him as they would hardly write of 
Nelson. The one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for. He paid the penalty; so did most of those for whose lives he was responsible. Had he brought them 
and the ship safely to land, nobody would have taken 
the smallest notice of him.

"Third romantic demand. The officers must be calm, 
proud, steady, unmoved in the intervals of shooting the 
terrified foreigners. The verdict that they had surpassed 
all expectations was unanimous. The actual evidence 
was that Mr. Ismay was told by the officer of his boat to 
go to hell, and that boats which were not full refused to 
go to the rescue of those who were struggling in the 
water in cork jackets. Reason frankly given: they were 
afraid. The fear was as natural as the officer's language to 
Mr. Ismay: who of us at home dare blame them or feel 
sure that we should have been any cooler or braver? But 
is it necessary to assure the world that only Englishmen 
could have behaved so heroically, and to compare their 
conduct with the hypothetic dastardliness which lascars or Italians or foreigners generally — say Nansen or Amundsen or the Duke of Abruzzi — would have shown in the same circumstances?

"Fourth romantic demand. Everybody must face death 
without a tremor; and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent, must play 'Nearer, my God, to Thee' 
as an accompaniment to the invitation to Mr. Ismay to go 
to hell. It was duly proclaimed that thus exactly it fell 
out. Actual evidence: the Captain and officers were so 
afraid of a panic that, though they knew the ship was 
sinking, they did not dare to tell the passengers so — especially the third-class passengers — and the band played 
Rag Times to reassure the passengers, who, therefore did 
not get into the boats, and did not realize their situation 
until the boats were gone and the ship was standing on 
her head before plunging to the bottom. What happened 
then Lady Duff Gordon has related, and the witnesses 
of the American enquiry could hardly bear to relate.

"I ask, What is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous,  
inhuman, braggartly lying? Here is a calamity which 
might well make the proudest man humble, and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent and 
mendacious. At all events, that is what our journalists 
assumed. Were they right or wrong? Did the press really 
represent the public? I am afraid it did. Churchmen and 
statesmen took much the same tone. The effect on me 
was one of profound disgust, almost of national dishonor. Am I mad? Possibly. At all events, that is how I felt and how I feel about it. It seems to me that when deeply moved men should speak the truth. The English nation appears to take precisely the contrary view. Again 
I am in the minority. What will be the end of it? — for 
England, I mean. Suppose we came into conflict with a 
race that had the courage to look facts in the face and 
the wisdom to know itself for what it was. Fortunately 
for us, no such race is in sight. Our wretched consolation must be that any other nation would have behaved just as absurdly."

On May 15th Harold Spender came to the rescue of
the race, described Shaw as Mephistopheles, "the spirit 
that denies," and produced a journalistic gem: "Put aside 
all the stories of false pathos and ignoble action, and 
there still remains a star! Throw out all the dross into 
the slag-heap, and there still emerges a nugget of shining 
ore!" R. B. Cunninghame Graham thought Spender's 
letter unfair, and said so on May 16th. Conan Doyle's 
protest appeared on May 20th:

"Sir, — I have just been reading the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw upon the loss of the Titanic, which appeared 
in your issue of May 14th. It is written professedly in 
the interests of truth, and accuses everyone around him 
of lying. Yet I can never remember any production 
which contained so much that was false within the same 
compass. How a man could write with such looseness 
and levity of such an event at such a time passes all comprehension. Let us take a few of the points. Mr. Shaw 
wishes — in order to support his perverse thesis, that there 
was no heroism — to quote figures to show that the 
women were not given priority in escape. He picks out, 
therefore, one single boat, the smallest of all, which was 
launched and directed under peculiar circumstances, 
which are now matter for enquiry. Because there were 
ten men and two women in this boat, therefore there 
was no heroism or chivalry; and all talk about it is affectation. Yet Mr. Shaw knows as well as I know that if he 
had taken the very next boat he would have been 
obliged to admit that there were 65 women out of 70 
occupants, and that in nearly all the boats navigation 
was made difficult by the want of men to do the rowing. 
Therefore, in order to give a false impression, he has 
deliberately singled out one boat; although he could not 
but be aware that it entirely misrepresented the general 
situation. Is this decent controversy, and has the writer 
any cause to accuse his contemporaries of misstatement?

"His next paragraph is devoted to the attempt to besmirch the conduct of Capt. Smith. He does it by his 
favorite method of 'Suggestio falsi' — the false suggestion 
being that the sympathy shown by the public for Capt. 
Smith took the shape of condoning Capt. Smith's navigation. Now everyone — including Mr. Bernard Shaw — 
knows perfectly well that no defense has ever been made 
of the risk which was run, and that the sympathy was at 
the spectacle of an old and honored sailor who has made 
one terrible mistake, and who deliberately gave his life 
in reparation, discarding his lifebelt, working to the last 
for those whom he had unwillingly injured, and finally 
swimming with a child to a boat into which he himself 
refused to enter. This is the fact, and Mr. Shaw's assertion that the wreck was hailed as a 'triumph of British 
navigation' only shows—what surely needed no showing 
— that a phrase stands for more than truth with Mr. 
Shaw. The same remark applies to his 'wrote of him as 
they would hardly write of Nelson.' If Mr. Shaw will 
show me the work of any responsible journalist in which 
Capt. Smith is written of in the terms of Nelson, I will gladly send £100 to the Fabian Society.

"Mr. Shaw's next suggestion — all the more poisonous 
because it is not put into so many words — is that the officers did not do their duty. If his vague words mean 
anything, they can only mean this. He quotes as if it were  
a crime the words of Lowe to Mr. Ismay when he interfered with his boat. I could not imagine a finer example of an officer doing his duty than that a subordinate should dare to speak thus to the managing director of the Line when he thought that he was impeding his 
life-saving work. The sixth officer went down with the 
Captain, so I presume that even Mr. Shaw could not ask 
him to do more. Of the other officers I have never heard 
or read any cause for criticism. Mr. Shaw finds some 
cause for offense in the fact that one of them discharged 
his revolver in order to intimidate some foreign emigrants who threatened to rush the boats. The fact and 
the assertion that these passengers were foreigners came 
from several eye-witnesses. Does Mr. Shaw think it 
should have been suppressed? If not what is he scolding 
about? Finally, Mr. Shaw tries to defile the beautiful 
incident of the band by alleging that it was the result of 
orders issued to avert panic. But if it were, how does that
detract either from the wisdom of the orders or from the 
heroism of the musicians? It was right to avert panic, 
and it was wonderful that men could be found to do it in such a way.

"As to the general accusation that the occasion has 
been used for the glorification of British qualities, we 
should indeed be a lost people if we did not honor courage and discipline when we see it in its highest form. 
That our sympathies extend beyond ourselves is shown 
by the fact that the conduct of the American male passengers, and very particularly of the much-abused millionaires, has been as warmly eulogized as any single feature in the whole wonderful epic. But surely it is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his 
gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people, 
regardless of the fact that his words must add to the grief
of those who have already had more than enough to bear."

Shaw's reply was printed on May 22nd:

"Sir, — I hope to persuade my friend Sir Arthur Conan 
Doyle, now that he has got his romantic and warm-hearted protest off his chest, to read my article again three or four times, and give you his second thoughts on the matter; for it is really not possible for any sane man to disagree with a single word that I have written.

"I again submit that when news of a shipwreck arrives 
without particulars, and journalists immediately begin to 
invent particulars, they are lying. It is nothing to the 
point that authentic news may arrive later on, and may
confirm a scrap or two of their more obvious surmises. 
The first narratives which reached us were those by an 
occupant of a boat in which there were ten men, two 
women, and plenty of room for more, and of an occupant of another boat which, like the first, refused to 
return to rescue the drowning because the people in it 
were avowedly afraid. It was in the face of that information, and of that alone, that columns of raving about 
women and children first were published. Sir Arthur 
says that I 'picked out' these boats to prove my case. 
Of course I did. I wanted to prove my case. They did 
prove it. They do prove it. My case is that our journalists 
wrote without the slightest regard to the facts; that they  
were actually more enthusiastic in their praise of the 
Titanic heroes on the day when the only evidence to 
hand was evidence of conduct for which a soldier would 
be shot and a Navy sailor hanged than when later news 
came in of those officers and crews who did their best; 
and that it must be evident to every reasonable man that 
if there had not been a redeeming feature in the whole 
case, exactly the same 'hogwash' (as Mr. Cunninghame Graham calls it in his righteous disgust) would have been lavished on the veriest dastards as upon a crew of Grace Darlings. The Captain positively lost popularity when the deliberate and calumnious lie that he had shot himself was dropped. May I ask what value real heroism has in a country which responds to these inept romances invented by people who can produce nothing after all but stories of sensational cowardice. Would Sir Arthur take a medal from the hands of the imbecile liars whom he is defending?

"Sir Arthur accuses me of lying; and I must say that 
he gives me no great encouragement to tell the truth. 
But he proceeds to tell, against himself, what I take to 
be the most thundering lie ever sent to a printer by a 
human author. He first says that I 'quoted as if it were a
crime' the words used by the officer who told Mr. Ismay 
to go to hell. I did not. I said the outburst was very 
natural, though not in my opinion admirable or heroic. 
If I am wrong, then I claim to be a hero myself; for it 
has occurred to me in trying circumstances to lose my 
head and temper and use the exact words attributed (by 
himself) to the officer in question. But Sir Arthur goes 
on to say: 'I could not imagine a finer example of an 
officer doing his duty than that a subordinate should 
dare to speak thus to the managing director of the Line 
when he thought he was impeding his life-saving work.' 
Yes, you could, Sir Arthur; and many a page of heroic 
romance from your hand attests that you often have 
imagined much finer examples. Heroism has not quite 
come to that yet; nor has your imagination contracted 
or your brain softened to the bathos of seeing sublimity 
in a worried officer telling even a managing director 
(godlike being!) to go to hell. I would not hear your 
enemy libel you so. But now that you have chivalrously 
libelled yourself, don't lecture me for reckless mendacity; for you have captured the record in the amazing sentence I have just quoted.

"I will not accept Sir Arthur's offer of £100 to the 
Fabian Society for every hyper-Nelsonic eulogy of the 
late Captain Smith which stands in the newspapers of 
those first days to bear out my very moderate description 
of them. I want to see the Fabian Society solvent, but 
not at the cost of utter destitution to a friend. I should 
not have run the risk of adding to the distress of Captain 
Smith's family by adding one word to facts that speak 
only too plainly for themselves, if others had been equally 
considerate. But if vociferous journalists will persist in 
glorifying the barrister whose clients are hanged, the 
physician whose patients die, the general who loses battles, and the captain whose ship goes to the bottom, 
such false coin must be nailed to the counter at any cost.
There have been British captains who have brought their 
ships safely through icefields by doing their plain duty 
and carrying out their instructions. There have been 
British captains who have seen to it that their crews 
knew their boats and their places in their boats, and who, 
when it became necessary to take to those boats, have 
kept discipline in the face of death, and not lost one life 
that could have been saved. And often enough nobody 
has said 'Thank you' to them for it, because they have 
not done mischief enough to stir the emotions of our 
romantic journalists. These are the men whom I admire 
and with whom I prefer to sail.

"I do not wish to imply that I for a moment believe 
that the dead man actually uttered all the heartbreaking 
rubbish that has been put into his mouth by fools and 
liars; nor am I forgetting that a captain may not be able 
to make himself heard and felt everywhere in these huge 
floating (or sinking) hotels as he can in a cruiser, or rally 
a mob of waiters and dock laborers as he could a crew 
of trained seamen. But no excuse, however good, can 
turn a failure into a success. Sir Arthur cannot be ignorant of what would happen had the Titanic been a 
King's ship, or of what the court-martial would have 
said and done on the evidence of the last few days. 
Owing to the fact that a member of my family was 
engaged in the Atlantic service, and perhaps also that I 
happen to know by personal experience what it is like 
to be face to face with death in the sea, I know what the 
risk of ice means on a liner, and know also that there is 
no heroism in being drowned when you cannot help it. 
The Captain of the Titanic did not, as Sir Arthur thinks, 
make 'a terrible mistake.' He made no mistake. He knew 
perfectly well that ice is the only risk that is considered 
really deadly in his line of work, and, knowing it, he 
chanced it and lost the hazard. Sentimental idiots, with 
a break in the voice, tell me that 'he went down to the
depths': I tell them, with the impatient contempt they 
deserve, that so did the cat. Heroism is extraordinarily 
fine conduct resulting from extraordinarily high character. Extraordinary circumstances may call it forth and 
may heighten its dramatic effect by pity and terror, by 
death and destruction, by darkness and a waste of waters;  
but none of these accessories are the thing itself; and to 
pretend that they are is to debase the moral currency by 
substituting the conception of sensational misfortune for  
inspiring achievement.

"I am no more insensible to the pity of the catastrophe than anyone else; but I have been driven by an intolerable provocation of disgusting and dishonorable nonsense to recall our journalists to their senses by saying bluntly that the occasion has been disgraced by a 
callous outburst of romantic lying. To this I now wish 
to add that if, when I said this, I had read the evidence  
elicited by Lord Mersey's inquiry as to the Californian 
and the Titanic's emergency boat, I should probably have expressed myself much more strongly. I refrain now only because the facts are beating the hysterics without my help."

It was no longer possible to extract much sentiment or romance from the stories of the survivors, so Doyle closed the discussion with quiet dignity on May 25th:

"Sir, — Without continuing a controversy which must 
be sterile, I would touch on only one point in Mr. 
Shaw's reply to my letter. He says that I accused him of 
lying. I have been guilty of no such breach of the amenities of the discussion. The worst I think or say of Mr. Shaw is that his many brilliant gifts do not include the power of weighing evidence; nor has he that quality — call it good taste, humanity, or what you will — which prevents a man from needlessly hurting the feelings of others."

Apparently Doyle thought it unnecessary to reconcile
his assertion that he had not accused Shaw of lying with 
his earlier statement that he could not "remember any 
production which contained so much that was false 
within the same compass" as the letter that had provoked 
his outburst. The newspaper's readers did not mind, for 
ninety-nine per cent of them would rather have been 
wrong with Conan Doyle than right with Bernard Shaw.


=== 11. The Man in the Street ===

Life at Hindhead in the early years of the century continued to be agreeable, and Doyle's participation in public affairs did not interfere with his activities in the world of sport. He took a course of muscular development with Sandow, the strong man who used to lift an elephant as a normal person would lift a paperweight and 
toss cannon balls about as his neighbor would toss tennis 
balls. Doyle's attempt to emulate Sandow was not wholly 
useless. He was driving a car, weighing over a ton, which 
"ran up a high bank, threw me out on a gravel drive 
below, and then, turning over, fell upon the top of me. 
The steering-wheel projected slightly from the rest, and 
thus broke the impact and undoubtedly saved my life, 
but it gave way under the strain, and the weight of the 
car settled across my spine just below the neck, pinning 
my face down on the gravel, and pressing with such 
terrific force as to make it impossible to utter a sound. I 
felt the weight getting heavier moment by moment, and 
wondered how long my vertebrae could stand it. However, they did so long enough to enable a crowd to collect and the car to be levered off me. I should think there are few who can say that they have held up a ton weight across their spine and lived unparalyzed to talk about it.  
It is an acrobatic feat which I have no desire to repeat."

His other feats as a sportsman were less exhausting. At 
cricket he was a good bat, a useful bowler, and played 
for the M.C.C. in several first-class matches. It was a 
great moment when W. G. Grace's wicket fell to him, 
though he did not feel so cheerful when W. G. returned 
the compliment. Once he was bowled by A. P. Lucas in 
a very singular way. The ball rose to a height of over 
thirty feet and fell clean on top of the bails. The incident provoked him to write a yarn which he called "The Story of Spedegue's Dropper." He continued to play for Barrie's team, but seldom took part in the accompanying festivities. A. E. W. Mason told me that on one occasion 
they all spent the night at the Lygon Arms, Broadway, 
except Doyle, who remarked as he parted from them, "I 
wonder what all the swells who live hereabouts think of 
the way you literary fellows take up the place." It almost  
seemed as if he did not regard himself as a "literary fellow." The fact is that games were for him something more than diversion, and he did not like it when people played at playing. Thus he attained a higher standard than is usual with an all-round man, and though he never 
got below a handicap of ten at golf, his proficiency at billiards enabled him to enter for the Amateur Championship and to get into the third round.

He tried his hand at pretty well everything, and was 
even anxious to drop from a balloon in a parachute, but 
satisfied himself with the more normal procedure, ascending some 6000 feet from the Crystal Palace and descending near Seven-Oaks. "The first time I went up in a balloon I was terribly frightened," he told P. G. Wodehouse, who interviewed him in 1903 for a paper called
V.C. "It was pleasant enough at first, with all the spectators cheering, and so on. But when we had been rising some minutes, and were a mile from the ground, and I looked over the side! — I was never in such a miserable fright in my life. To see people running about, looking the size of dogs, and to feel that there was only a sort of 
strawberry-basket between me and that! It was a long time before I would let go of the ropes. But after I had been up a little while I became quite used to it, and I suppose that is what happens to everyone."

Doyle's simplicity is quaintly illustrated in two passages on the same page of his autobiography. In the first he writes against shooting for sport, because it blunts our better feelings, hardens our sympathies and brutalizes our natures. In the second he writes in favor of fishing 
for sport, because the fish is a cold-blooded creature 
which does not feel pain like a hare or a deer. But the 
effect on our natures of unhooking a gasping fish and 
leaving it to die by degrees must be more brutalizing 
than that of knocking a wounded pheasant on the head. 
As for his suggestion that it is "the sweet solitude of 
Nature, the romantic quest, rather than the actual capture which appeals to the fisherman," one can only reply that fishermen have been seen on pier-heads and that real lovers of Nature would not spoil their enjoyment of it by messing about with hooks and lines.

Though he expended more energy in sport than most 
men give to work, Doyle produced more work than 
those of his contemporaries who had neither time nor 
inclination for sport. He could write under any sort of 
condition. Sometimes he went to his study before the 
rest of the household was awake and wrote hard until 
breakfast-time. Sometimes he sat down immediately after 
a game of golf and worked until his brain gave out. He 
could detach himself completely from his surroundings 
and knock off a story while a crowd of people were
talking and laughing in the same room, suddenly interjecting a remark which showed that he had followed the 
conversation while his pen had never ceased moving. 
Occasionally he slaved away as if his life depended on 
it. When he heard of the Congo atrocities he got all the 
first-hand accounts available and shut himself up in his 
study for a week, not once taking his slippers off to go 
out until he had written his pamphlet. Thus, in spite of 
his physical activities, his output was considerable, and 
in the first decade of the century the public were treated 
to more Holmes stories, more Gerard stories, more short 
stories about sport, warfare, and adventure, a volume of 
talk about his favorite books, Through the Magic Door, 
and another long historical novel, Sir Nigel, which describes the early life of Loring, hero of The White Company. If anything the later book is the better of the two, yet it never became so popular, much to the disappointment of the author, who did not perceive the 
cause. In the intervening fifteen years the public had vicariously enjoyed its bath of blood. Kitchener had obliged it with the battle of Omdurman, which had manured the desert with dervishes, the Matabeles had provided much food for powder, and the Boers had been even more accommodating. The age no longer panted 
for deeds of chivalry, and the idealistic pre-Quixote note 
of Sir Nigel found no echo in a country that had just 
concluded a series of campaigns for dividends.

But there was no falling off in the demand for Doyle's 
short stories, which whetted the popular appetite for 
sport, mystery, thrills and horror. He could not help giving the man in the street what he wanted because he 
himself was the man in the street; indeed so exactly did 
he represent the normal man that one might call him 
Everyman in the street. But the normal man is not the 
healthy innocent our newspapers would like us to think 
him. He is a mixture of strange desires, domestic sentiment, cruelty, kindness, and morbidity; and Doyle expressed his less pleasant characteristics as unerringly as his more presentable ones. The story in which the leper woman infects Captain Sharkey; the episode of the 
jealous Turk who persuades his wife's lover, an eminent 
surgeon, to remove her lower lip while she lies drugged, 
her features hidden by a yashmak; the torturing of the 
Marquise de Brinvilliers; these and a dozen other yarns 
display Doyle as the medium for what was barbarous in 
the ordinary man. "I have myself, in my complex nature, 
a hunger after all which is bizarre and fantastic," says 
the teller of one of these tales. Doyle was simple enough 
to think himself complex merely because he was not all 
of one pattern. Sir Max Pemberton tells us that Doyle's 
"bias towards the horrific" was apparent in his conversation as well as in his stories: "Upon one topic he was always delightful [sic]. Why the Barbary pirates so attracted him it is difficult to say. But if ever I desired to set him going with warmth I had but to mention those 
corsairs of the Mediterranean, who used to descend gaily 
upon the shores of the Midi and there proceed to butcher 
and burn. Doyle himself thought chiefly about the poor 
women thus carried to the harems of Barbary. The tortures they must have suffered were for him a fascinating study upon which he could always talk with eloquence and with pity. Such pictures of the habits of good-looking corsairs as the Decameron painted for us were not in 
Sir Arthur's gallery. He did not tell of handsome youths wooing beautiful maidens in the luxurious cabins of ships, where the wine flowed and the fruit was luscious. Rather he spoke of fire and torture in terms which caused the blood to freeze."

Here we may pause to note that all unimaginative 
folk love the fanciful, the horrible, and the uncanny, 
which for them add a relish to life, just as people without  
sensitive palates love curry. The imaginative ones do not
require such stimulants, finding the common round 
enough to stir their creative or engage their contemplative faculties. Doyle, and many others, mistook the 
fanciful for the imaginative, whereas the diagnostic of 
the truly imaginative man is a sense of reality. The imagination wrestles with life and is intuitive; the fancy plays 
around life and is inventive. Poetry, so called, is more 
often a flight of the fancy than an effort of the imagination, which, because it grapples with reality, expresses itself in humorous prose more readily than in serious poetry; and so we find that Dr. Johnson's greatest biographies are more imaginative than Shelley's finest lyrics,  
Falstaff's speeches than Milton's sonnets. The imaginative  
type, Shakespeare at its highest, deals with everyday life  
and only occasionally with the bizarre. The fanciful 
type, Dickens at its highest, revels in the weird and only  
touches reality in flashes. Except for The Merry Wives 
of Windsor (a "command" performance which had to 
be written on the spur of the moment) Shakespeare 
never even troubled to invent a plot; while Dickens 
loved mystifying his readers with plots that became 
more and more ingenious and involved, and died before 
disentangling his last, which still exercises the minds of  
fanciers. Perhaps the purest example of the man of fancy 
in literature is Poe, who has been called the grand master  
of imagination by people who do not know the difference. Had Shakespeare written short stories he might have called them "Tales of Reality and Imagination." Poe should have called his collection "Tales of Mystery and Fancy."

Doyle, in macabre vein, was a disciple of Poe. He was 
brimful of fancy and restricted in imagination. But he 
was too normal to get Poe's effects, and when he tried 
to outdo Poe in horror he overdid it, giving the reader a 
physical shock instead of a spiritual shudder. He had an 
adolescent ambition to make the reader's flesh creep, and
editors sometimes found it necessary to make him tone 
down his work for publication. One of his tales, "The 
Curse of Eve," is a description of an accortchement 
which, after a crisis, ends with the mother and child 
doing well and the father in a state of rapture. But 
Francis Gribble told me that he heard Doyle read it at 
the Authors' Club before it appeared in Jerome's paper 
The Idler, and that in the original version the wife died 
and the bereaved father tried to kill the baby, shouting 
at it, "You little beast, you've murdered your mother!" 
Doyle saw life melodramatically, like Dickens, his characters being as theatrical as those of Dickens, though much less various.

Such sense of reality as Doyle possessed only functioned when he described scenes of action. Here Scott 
was his master in the longer romances, while his short 
tales (other than those about Holmes and Gerard) have 
something in common with the stories of Maupassant. 
Of course Maupassant, being French, was obsessed with 
sex, while Doyle, being more English than an Englishman, was obsessed with sport; but one is not surprised 
to learn from Doyle that he and Maupassant once hit on 
an identical theme: "I had been traveling in Switzerland 
and had visited, among other places, that Gemmi Pass, 
where a huge cliff separates a French from a German 
canton. On the summit of this cliff was a small inn, 
where we broke our journey. It was explained to us that, 
although the inn was inhabited all the year round, still 
for about three months in winter it was utterly isolated, 
because it could at any time only be approached by 
winding paths on the mountain-side, and when these 
became obliterated by snow it was impossible either to 
come up or to descend. They could see the lights in the 
valley beneath them, but were as lonely as if they lived 
in the moon. So curious a situation naturally appealed 
to one's imagination, and I speedily began to build up a
short story in my own mind, depending upon a group 
of strong antagonistic characters being penned up in this 
inn, loathing each other and yet utterly unable to get 
away from each other's society, every day bringing them 
nearer to tragedy. For a week or so, as I traveled, I was 
turning over the idea. At the end of that time I returned 
through France. Having nothing to read I happened to 
buy a volume of Maupassant's Tales which I had never 
seen before. The first story was called L'Auberge (The 
Inn) — and as I ran my eye down the printed page I was 
amazed to see the two words 'Kandersteg' and 'Gemmi 
Pass.' I settled down and read it with ever-growing 
amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I had visited. 
The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people 
through the snowfall. Everything that I imagined was 
there, save that Maupassant had brought in a savage hound."

Not wholly unaware of the fact that there is no recommendation like self-dispraise, Doyle sometimes affected a humble attitude in estimating his fictional achievements: "If we writers of stories have not great brains ourselves, we can at least provide something which will rest or distract the brains of others who work at more 
serious tasks than our own." Yet he was far from indifferent to criticism, kept press-cuttings about his books, 
and once begged Lacon Watson to review his poems for 
The Bookman. This was a ticklish job, because the writing of poetry was not among Doyle's many gifts. He could write verse, of a sort, but not once throughout a volume of it is a deep emotion distilled by the imagination into perfect expression. His most successful effort  
combines his love of sport and Puritanism, the conflict 
between the two providing him with one of those excellent strokes of comedy which give vitality to all his best work. "Bendy's Sermon" tells how Bendigo, the famous Nottingham prize-fighter, takes to religion and preaches at revivalist meetings all over the country. On one such occasion a crowd of fellow-bruisers turn up and interrupt his prayers with ironical comments. He prays hard for strength to endure the mockery, but at last he gives in— 

Then Bendy said, "Good Lord, since first I left my sinful 
ways,<br />
Thou knowest that to Thee alone I've given up my days,<br />
But now, dear Lord"—and here he laid his Bible on the 
shelf—<br /> 
"I'll take, with your permission, just five minutes for 
myself."

He leaps from the pulpit and proceeds to knock hell out of the skeptics— 

So that's the way that Bendy ran his mission in the slum,<br />
And preached the Holy Gospel to the fightin' men of Brum,<br />
"The Lord," said he, "has given me His message from on high,<br />
And if you interrupt Him, I will know the reason why."

Doyle's personal tastes are reflected in everything he 
wrote and one has only to read his books in order to 
understand why he was liked by nearly everyone who 
met him. He could discuss religion or sport or literature 
or war or torture or politics or science or murder with 
equal zest because he was equally interested in all of 
them. "He was one of the nicest men I have ever met," 
H. de Vere Stacpoole wrote to me, "a grand man in 
every sense of the word"; and this was the general verdict. He was always ready with advice, usually helpful, 
and F. Anstey relates how, when The Strand was about 
to serialize his novel The Brass Bottle, Doyle told him 
to ask for ten guineas a thousand words, which he accordingly demanded and received. Doyle also advised 
Anstey to turn his story The Man from Blankley's into a
play, which made a small fortune for the author. But the 
man who attacked King Leopold of Belgium and the 
police authorities of Great Britain was not likely to keep 
quiet when a fellow scribe misconducted himself, and a 
famous writer of those days, Hall Caine, whose novels 
sold by the hundred thousand, received a private rap 
over the knuckles from Doyle when his methods of 
puffing himself and his books became excessive. I quote 
from a copy of the letter which Doyle left among his papers:

"DEAR HALL CAINE,

"Your letter and Massingham's arrived together by this 
morning's post. I am very sorry if anything I say seems 
offensive or is painful to you. I wish to make it as little 
so as possible but on the other hand I am bound to say 
what I think.

"It was a common subject of remark at the time of the 
appearance of 'The Manxman' that the book had had 
public attention drawn to it in an unusual fashion. Then 
came 'The Christian' and again the same outcrop of preliminary paragraphs and notices. I am quite prepared to 
allow that this may have arisen to some extent from 
causes outside your own control, but you must allow that 
this involves injudicious and reckless trust in newspaper 
men with a carelessness as to what they may do or say 
which is not fitting in the case of one who stands as 
highly as you do. The explanation is only less serious 
than the alternative. It is your duty to see interviews in 
the proof, and as far as possible to check injudicious 
newspaper comments. Surely that is self-evident. I am 
convinced that you are wrong in thinking that my letter 
suggested any other articles or paragraphs which may 
have appeared to the same effect. I am sure that there 
was a general feeling that if this could pass there was 
an end to any attempt at professional etiquette in the 
future, and that each protest was independent of the 
other. It would be a real pleasure to me if I could conscientiously write such a sentence as you suggest and I 
would do it in an instant if I could, but though it is true
that the letter was written in some haste, you make it 
plain that you took no steps to check it, and that you 
did not at once repudiate or contradict it, although you 
actually wrote a letter correcting one point in it.

"I don't think you have any solid grounds in any of 
your counter-attacks. In the medical profession to which 
I belong all public breaches of professional etiquette are  
corrected by public protests in the medical papers. I 
fancy it is the same in the law. I know of no other means 
of influencing professional opinion. As to impressions I 
was not commenting upon them but upon a concrete 
thing — an interview with a number of statements purporting to be from your own lips.

"Where also is the breach of etiquette in my protesting 
before the book appeared? Surely that was the right time 
to protest against injudicious preliminary comments. My 
protest had nothing to do with the book. I wished and 
wish it every success... but I want a high standard kept 
up in our noble profession and when you see me falling 
away from it I will thank you if you will remind me of it.  
It is true that we are very much at the mercy of newspaper men and publishers but we can keep them in some 
sort of control if we wish. As I said before there is no 
reason why I should pose as a purist, save that someone 
has to do unpleasant and unthankful work — but I might 
say as a case in point that I wrote this week to the magazine with which I have been most identified, threatening 
to finally sever my connection with them because they 
had an advertisement praising a serial which I had written  
for them. It is for critics not for authors or editors to 
praise or blame. But the business men won't conform to 
this unless the Author sets his foot down firmly. And the 
younger men won't conform to any etiquette unless the 
leaders of the profession — like yourself — give them a decided lead.

"I am sorry to seem so cantankerous.

"Yours faithfully,<br />
"A. CONAN DOYLE"

The fact that Edinburgh University had bestowed the 
degree of L.L.D. on Doyle in 1905 may have encouraged
him to read this lesson to Hall Caine; but, as he grew 
older, preaching took the place of fighting, just as it did  
with Bendigo, Oliver Cromwell, and other pious souls.

His multifarious activities left him little time to enjoy 
the quiet home life which, he once said, was the sort of 
existence he would have chosen. (But one has heard this 
so often from men of action.) Owing to the poor health 
of his wife he did very little entertaining on a large scale 
at Hindhead, though his daughter Mary recalls an occasion when he asked the officers of the French navy to 
"Undershaw." The Entente Cordiale between the two 
nations was then in its early and hearty stage, the French 
fleet was at Portsmouth, and Doyle invited every French-speaking person he knew to meet his guests. "My father 
had no interest whatever in social gatherings, as such, 
but only when they linked up with a big international 
idea," Miss Conan Doyle informed me. In speaking of 
their childhood on Hindhead, she said that her brother 
Kingsley and herself were free to roam the countryside, 
and used to spend their summer holidays at Seaview, 
near Ryde, without supervision, but that they always 
had to be punctual and scrupulously clean at meals. They 
were brought up in Victorian fashion, their father a 
rather fearsome figure in the background, held in reserve 
by nurses as a threat if they were naughty. "If you aren't 
good I'll tell Daddy and you'll be punished," was the 
usual admonition. Their mother, a permanent invalid, 
was utterly unselfish, never complained of her lot, and 
seemed to them a saint. As for Daddy, despite his severe 
mustache and reputation as a menace to ill-doers, he 
sometimes threw his cares to the winds and acted like a 
grown-up boy, bursting with high spirits, quite irresponsible, saying the oddest things and behaving in the oddest way. One such outburst has been recorded by a visitor. The family were sitting about the hall after dinnei one night when a storm arose outside. "Hullo!" exclaimed Doyle: "rain! I should like to go for a stroll in this." Accompanied by one of the younger members of the party he set out for a tramp over the hills, returning in an hour or so "dripping at every angle" and thirsting for a game of billiards, at which he made a break of nearly three figures.

His wife died in 1906 and for some time he could not 
settle down to work. He visited Scotland, and while 
brooding in solitude at an inn near Dunbar he received 
an invitation to spend a week-end with Arthur James 
Balfour at Whittinghame. The house-party drew him 
out of himself and he talked nineteen to the dozen. Balfour was bubbling over with joy, having just won a gold 
medal at North Berwick, which gave him keener pleasure than any political success had done, and "laughed 
heartily at small provocation." He had been Prime Minister when the Russian fleet, en route for Japan, had 
fired at British trawlers on the Dogger Bank, and he 
spoke of the occurrence in a gentle voice and disinterested manner: "I was very angry, really very angry 
about that affair... Their Ambassador called that 
morning and gave complete assurances, or really I should 
have had to do something." Doyle was much impressed 
by the ritual of family prayers at Whittinghame, the entire domestic staff being present. "It was fine to hear 
groom and statesman praying humbly together that they 
be forgiven the sins of the day, and merging all earthly 
distinctions in the presence of that which is above us all." 
If he had stayed for more than a week-end, the impression would have worn off.

The Edalji case, coming to his notice just then, helped 
him to forget his sorrows; and his marriage in September 
1907 to Miss Jean Leckie, whose family he had known 
for some time, made a new man of him. To be near his 
wife's people, he sold "Undershaw" and bought a house 
at Crowborough called "Windlesham," which he gradually transformed. He also took a London flat, No. 15 Buckingham Palace Mansions. There were three children by his second marriage, Denis, Adrian, and Lena Jean (known in the family as "Billy"). Their upbringing 
differed from that of Mary and Kingsley. Doyle's struggling days were over; no longer had he to take care of 
an invalid or to worry about a household. His second 
wife screened him from many troubles, managed his 
affairs, kept unwelcome visitors at bay, and generally 
speaking looked after him. Thus his cares dropped from 
him, and he became far more genial and expansive at 
home. "My honeymoon began on the day I was wed, 
and will continue right through eternity," he said to a 
friend not long before his death. But apart from the 
subduing influence of his second wife, the age was rapidly shedding the austerities of the nineteenth century, 
and Doyle, the medium of his age, slackened with it. The 
typical Victorian father became the typical Georgian 
father. The spiritual change was noticeable in his mustache, which from the stiff military one of Hindhead became the soft drooping one of Crowborough. Naturally the offspring of his second marriage benefited from the change, and they have nothing but happy memories of their childhood. Their parents adored one another 
and they adored their parents.

It was partly his romantic temperament but chiefly 
his need for money that inclined Doyle to the theater 
the moment it became clear that he would have to bring 
up a second family. Already he had done well out of a 
drama on Sherlock Holmes, written by William Gillette, 
an American actor who played the leading character, 
and brought to the Lyceum Theatre, London, in the 
autumn of 1901, after a successful run in the States. 
Originally Doyle had written a five-act drama on 
Holmes. Gillette found it impracticable as it stood, but
saw great possibilities in the character, and offered to 
write a play if he were given carte blanche in the selection of incidents and dialogue. On the advice of his 
agent, Doyle agreed, and scrapped his own drama. 
Gillette then steeped himself in the Adventures and 
Memoirs and struggled with his play, at last declaring 
that it was not possible to put Holmes on the stage. But 
his manager, Charles Frohman, encouraged him to go 
on trying, stopped his tour, and left him free to work on 
the play. In four weeks Gillette was delivered of his 
drama, wherein the first and last of the Adventures were 
ingeniously dovetailed and bits from several others appeared. A little later his single copy was burned when the theater in which he was playing at San Francisco was destroyed by fire. Again he shut himself up and reappeared in a fortnight with the play rewritten. It was 
a big success, and innumerable touring companies in England and America made a regular income for the creator of Holmes.

Doyle then decided to dramatize another of his popular characters, and a play on Brigadier Gerard, with [[Lewis Waller]] in the title-role, had a fair success at the Imperial Theatre early in 1906. The press notices were not wholly favorable, and on March 12th his mother sent 
him words of comfort. From her letter, which he preserved, we can see why he portrayed her as Lady Ermyntrude in Sir Nigel:

"God bless you and yours, my dearest, but never forget that you are His, who gave you to me for His glory and to do His holy will... Don't trouble your dear heart with the critics... they have not really studied the dear Brigadier in the pages of his creator. I fear also that  
many, perhaps unconsciously, are irked by your successes. 
Above all, I should avoid the 'gentle art of making enemies.' I do not see that it does any good. We cannot supply brains, sense of beauty and fitness to others, and we should be sorry for them. The Conan arm is strong and his lance keen. He should be careful and reserve his 
powers for those (and they are but few nowadays) 
worthy of his steel."

Some three years later [[Lewis Waller]] produced Doyle's 
play The Fires of Fate, a dramatization of The Tragedy 
of the Korosko, at the Lyric Theatre, and had a moderate success with it. After which Doyle plunged head first into the theatrical whirlpool and was nearly drowned. He had written a stage version of Rodney Stone, which included the fights. As the cost of production would be 
at least £2000, no manager dared to risk it; so the author 
took the Ade1phi Theatre on a six-months' lease at a 
rent which, with the salaries of the cast, came to about 
£600 a week, and The House of Temperley, as he called 
it, appeared in the spring of 1910. It failed for three reasons: the women stayed away, because in those days they 
were thought to be too gentle to watch even a fictitious 
prize-fight; there was a theatrical slump; and finally King  
Edward VII died. Doyle was left with an expensive 
theater on his hands at a moment when there were no 
bids for it. Holmes had saved him so often in the past 
that he banked on the detective to repeat the miracle, 
wrote steadily for a week, and was rehearsing The 
Speckled Band within a fortnight of the previous play's 
disappearance. H. A. Saintsbury, who had acted Holmes 
in Gillette's play over a thousand times on tour, was 
chosen for that part; and Lyn Harding, the finest all-round Shakespearian actor of his time, was cast for the 
villain, Dr. Grimesby Rylott ("Roylott" in the short 
story), and engaged to produce the play. There were 
heated arguments at rehearsals between author and producer. Doyle had pictured Rylott as an old-fashioned 
melodramatic villain in a frock coat; but Harding wanted 
to create a character and asked Doyle to write in lines
that would bring out more boldly certain dramatic moments. Doyle, slow to see another point of view, refused, 
and sat stolidly in the stalls with the text in front of him, 
seldom looking up at the actors as they spoke their lines; 
while Harding, convinced that the character needed some 
extraneous decoration, set to work on his own account, 
building up the villain by degrees as a neurotic, now 
blinking an eye, now making a leg tremble, now pulling 
at a lock of hair on his forehead. Doyle never lost his 
temper, but he was displeased and told Harding in his 
calm way that he thought the part was being burlesqued. 
For a few days their relations, which had previously 
been pleasant, became strained. Harding was insistent 
and Doyle was upset. The date of production drawing 
near, and an agreement seeming farther away than ever, 
Doyle's manager suggested that James Barrie, a friend 
of both actor and author, should be invited to attend the 
next rehearsal. At the end of the second act Barrie turned 
to Doyle and said, "Let Harding have his own way." A 
sound piece of advice, for Dr. Rylott electrified the audience on the first night and received over a dozen "calls"; after which the author walked across to the Grand Hotel and wrote to thank the actor for his wonderful characterization.

Lyn Harding's thrilling performance made the success 
of the play and got Doyle out of his managerial difficulties. He showed his appreciation when the piece was 
revived in 1921 by Harding, who related the sequel to 
me: "He came one night to see the play and asked if we 
were making a profit. When I told him we were just 
breaking even he said, 'Don't send me any author's fees 
until you do make a profit,' and he instructed his agents at once."

Apart from the films, both silent and vocal, Holmes 
made one more appearance on the stage during his creator's lifetime, when Harold Terry and Arthur Rose wrote a drama round "The Return," and Eille Norwood, 
who had made a reputation in the part on the screen, 
played Sherlock. Doyle did not attend the rehearsals, but  
he was in a box on the first night at the Princes Theatre. 
After the final curtain the audience shouted for him, and  
he took a call with Terry and Rose, saying, in response 
to cries for a speech: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I am only 
the grandfather; these two are the parents."

One theatrical gamble was enough for him, though he 
lost thousands in other business ventures. He passed on 
the lesson he had learned to his friends. Horace Annesley  
Vachell sends me this: "About the time when my play, 
Quinneys, was running gaily along at the Haymarket 
Theatre, he adjured me not to abandon substance, the 
writing of novels, for shadow. He spoke of the theater 
as a land of shadows, a sort of fourth Dimension. 'In the  
theater,' he said, let another fellow back your brains, 
don't back them with your own cash.' Sound advice." 
Towards the close of his life Doyle confessed that "If 
when I earned money I had dug a hole in the garden 
and buried it there I should be a much richer man 
today." Gold-mines, coal-mines, machines for one thing 
or another, sunken treasure, island treasure; anything 
that had a spice of adventure about it appealed to him, 
and he usually paid heavily for the excitement. On the 
other hand he was a director of Raphael Tuck & Sons, 
Ltd., for thirty years, displaying "sound common sense 
and business acumen"; he was chairman of Besson's brass 
instrument firm for a long period; and on account of his 
known qualities as a shrewd and diplomatic man he was 
chosen by Lord Northcliffe to unify the opposing factions that had resulted from the apathy of the British Committee for the Olympic Games. He was also quite capable of looking after his own interests, as the following letter to his play-agent, Arthur Hardy, shows:

"29: 10: 08<br />
"DEAR MR. HARDY,     

"I think that it would be better that I should take both 
The Fires of Fate' and the Boxing Play back into my 
own hands.

"The arrangement between us was that you should have 
5% if you placed the plays, but as a matter of fact it is I 
who have negotiated entirely (bar your one interview) 
with Aubrey Smith, just as it was I who negotiated with 
Vedrenne in the case of 'Fires of Fate,' and I foresee that 
it will be the same with the Boxing Play. I have found 
the openings, so why should I continue to use your 
agency? It really forms a needless complication. I may 
say that in the case of 'Brigadier Gerard' also, it was I 
who approached Waller and managed the whole thing, so 
that I have always felt the payment of commission an 
unnecessary thing. However, Bright drew the agreement, 
embodying what I had arranged, and in that way it came about.

"I don't want to leave you with any sense of grievance, so if you will give me an idea of what any services you have rendered up to date come to I would write you a cheque for the amount.

"Yours very truly,<br />
"A. CONAN DOYLE"

Incidentally Doyle lost about £8000 through leaving 
his theatrical affairs in the hands of Addison Bright, who 
made false returns, but got it back from the executors 
after Bright had committed suicide.

In 1912 Doyle broke fresh ground as a novelist, producing The Lost World, in which pterodactyls, dinosaurs, iguanodons, stegosauri, and such-like fauna crowd 
the landscape. It is the sort of thing that children are 
supposed to enjoy, and like all caterers for children, 
from the author of "Bluebeard" to James Barrie and 
Walt Disney, Doyle had a pronounced streak of morbidity in his nature, due to an excess of fancy and an undeveloped imagination. The mysteries of the South 
American forests were sufficiently alarming before 1914, 
and even inspired a party of Americans to take a yacht 
and sail up the Amazon in search of Doyle's Lost World, 
the expedition being organized and equipped by the 
Pennsylvania University Museum; but since then we 
have discovered that nothing sub-human, super-human, 
pre-human or preter-human could possibly surpass in 
horror the primitive doings of ordinary humanity.

An amusing instance of the cleavage between Doyle's 
conventional opinions and his individual feelings is given 
in the character of Lord John Roxton. "Like most men 
of action, he is laconic in speech, and sinks readily into 
his own thoughts," says the writer, accepting the current  
view that strong men are silent. He then exhibits Roxton 
reeling off speeches by the yard, his instinct having 
prompted him to show the man of action as he always 
is in real life — a windbag.

What mainly concerns us in The Lost World, however, is the first appearance of Professor Challenger, "a character who has always amused me more than any other which I have invented," said the author, who believed that his model had been Professor Rutherford of 
Edinburgh University; but although he delineated Rutherford's physical characteristics, the originality, idiosyncrasies, fiery energy and uncertain temper of the man are copied direct from his old friend Dr. Budd, who peeps out spasmodically from several of Doyle's 
heroes and villains, and plays the leading part in a tale  
called "Crabe's Practice," but who inspires Professor 
Challenger throughout. The most entertaining of all the 
Professor's outbursts occurs in The Poison Belt (1913), 
in which the inhabitants of the world are destroyed by 
something malignant in the atmosphere. Explaining the 
curious effect that the poison is having on himself and 
breaking it gently to his friends that something queer
is happening to the universe, the Professor becomes pure Budd:

"You will the more easily condone any mental aberration upon your own part when you realise that even I have had moments when my balance has been disturbed. We have had for some years in this household a housekeeper — one Sarah, with whose second name I 
have never attempted to burden my memory. She is a 
woman of a severe and forbidding aspect, prim and 
demure in her bearing, very impassive in her nature, 
and never known within our experience to show signs 
of any emotion. As I sat alone at my breakfast — Mrs. 
Challenger is in the habit of keeping her room of a 
morning — it suddenly entered my head that it would be 
entertaining and instructive to see whether I could find 
any limits to this woman's imperturbability. I devised a 
simple but effective experiment. Having upset a small 
vase of flowers which stood in the centre of the cloth, 
I rang the bell and slipped under the table. She entered, 
and, seeing the room empty, imagined that I had withdrawn to the study. As I had expected, she approached 
and leaned over the table to replace the vase. I had a 
vision of a cotton stocking and an elastic-sided boot. 
Protruding my head, I sank my teeth into the calf of 
her leg. The experiment was successful beyond belief. 
For some moments she stood paralysed, staring down at 
my head. Then with a shriek she tore herself free and 
rushed from the room. I pursued her with some thoughts 
of an explanation, but she flew down the drive, and some 
minutes afterwards I was able to pick her out with my 
field-glass travelling very rapidly in a south-westerly 
direction. I tell you the anecdote for what it is worth. 
I drop it into your brains and await its germination. Is 
it illuminative? Has it conveyed anything to your minds?"

Other influences besides Budd are traceable in Challenger, for Doyle had lately been studying theatrical effects in contemporary drama, witness the brief duologue between Challenger and his servant:

"Austin!" said his master. 

"Yes, sir?"

"I thank you for your faithful service."

A smile stole over the servant's gnarled face.

"I've done my duty, sir."

"I'm expecting the end of the world today, Austin." 

"Yes, sir. What time, sir?"

"I can't say, Austin. Before evening."

"Very good, sir."

The taciturn Austin saluted and withdrew.

Doyle's boylike belief in the superiority of dons, to 
which allusion has been made in an earlier chapter, is 
again manifested when Professor Summerlee faces up 
to the crisis like a man: "It was a brave, good speech, 
a speech from that staunch and strong spirit which lay 
behind all the acidities and angularities of the old zoologist." Another brilliant Professor, Dr. Maupuis (in real life Dr. Geley), appears in The Land of Mist (1926), where Doyle's spiritualistic ardor surges over into fiction and Challenger is chosen to expose a medium and 
then to be converted. We can only feel profoundly 
thankful that their creator was fonder of Challenger 
than of Holmes.

Like the man in the street, Doyle reverenced human 
encyclopedias, and he reacted to public events exactly 
like the man in the street. Describing the funeral of 
Queen Victoria for the New York World he called her 
"the dead saint," and in his account of King Edward 
VII's obsequies for the Daily Mail he referred to "the 
troop of Kings who escorted their dead peer, with the 
noble Kaiser riding at their head. England has lost something of her old kindliness if she does not take him back
into her heart today." This article was reissued as a 
pamphlet, and when he came across a copy some years 
later he placed a full stop after the word "peer" and 
drew his pen through the rest. Until 1911 he had done 
his best to promote amicable relations between the English and German peoples; but in that year he took part 
in the International Road Competition organized by 
Prince Henry of Prussia, perceived from the behavior 
of both British and German officers that war was inevitable, advised a firm in which he was interested to remove its money from Berlin, studied German war literature, and wrote articles warning his country of the dangers ahead. He was perhaps the first to realize that Great Britain could be beaten by the submarine, and he renewed his advocacy of a Channel Tunnel, strenuously urged the home growth of food, and said that the threat could be averted by the construction of submarine food-carriers.

In May 1914 he and his wife accepted an invitation 
from the Canadian Government to inspect the National 
Reserve at Jasper Park in the Northern Rockies. The 
Grand Trunk Railway placed a private car at their disposal, and in every way the trip was made costless and comfortable for them. While in New York he inspected The Tombs and Sing Sing prisons, walking round in a shamefaced way, "for it makes you feel so when you 
encounter human suffering which you cannot relieve"; 
and of course he revisited his beloved Parkman country.  
Shortly after their return war broke out, and for the 
next four years his legs and pen were equally busy.

He described the 1914-18 war as "the physical climax 
of my life as it must be of the life of every living man 
and woman." To those of us who had something better 
to do than fool around with guns and buttons it was 
simply a tedious and insufferable interruption of life;  
but Doyle as usual spoke for the great majority. On
the day that war was declared he held a meeting at 
Crowborough and initiated what eventually became the 
Volunteer Force (mostly composed of men above military age) which in time numbered some 200,000 up and down the country. He remained a private in the Crowborough Company for over four years, drilling, marching, signaling, camping, rifle-practicing, and thoroughly 
enjoying it all. Meantime he was making all sorts of 
suggestions in the newspapers, mostly of a life-saving 
nature. Body armor and shields for the soldiers was one 
of them (Dr. Budd first put the idea into his head), and 
though the War Office was impervious to the scheme its 
development in the form of steel helmets and tanks 
proved that it was not so medieval as it seemed. Because 
of his agitation for india-rubber collars, safety waist-coats, and collapsible boats, many men in the navy owed their lives to him; but, needless to say, he "never received a word of acknowledgment or thanks from the Admiralty" for doing their thinking for them. He visited the British front and sometimes "felt more emotional than befits a Briton in foreign parts"; he had a close shave on the Italian front when three shells burst about ten meters above the open car in which he was speeding; and he was most courteously received on the French front, where he noticed that the soldiers wore wound stripes, a human and consolatory touch which, as it could be appreciated without much mental effort, the British War Office copied when Doyle drew their attention to it.

While in France he was able to see his brother Innes (a general) and his son Kingsley, both of whom survived the war but died of pneumonia shortly after its conclusion. He was always the "big brother" of Southsea days to Innes, who was afraid of opposing his anticonscription views in person and with difficulty summoned up the courage to disagree with him on paper, as the following proves:

"22 Aug: 1915<br />
"DEAR OLD BOY,<br/>
"I have written so many letters to you about compulsory service and torn them up that I can't remember 
what I have said and what I have not. I always feel like 
a rabbit in front of a boa constrictor when I try to put 
any opinions before you. I never dare to say to you that 
I don't agree at all and yet that is substantially the case 
about this... I cannot understand you still saying that 
armies don't require preparing beforehand. You who led 
the crowd to prepare for the Olympic Games..."

Innes helped him with hints and information for The 
British Campaign in France and Flanders (6 vols.), the 
writing of which occupied him all through the war and 
for some time after it. He corresponded with several 
generals during the campaign and talked with many 
junior officers who had taken part in the different 
actions. He even made notes of rumors heard in clubs. 
Among his papers I found these jottings, the first of 
which concerns the battle of Heligoland Bight:

"Gossip. Crimes Club. Nov. 9<br />
"German sailors were convinced that the British meant 
to shoot them and were exceedingly grateful for kind 
treatment. One who had both forearms shot away waved 
his stumps and cried, "Hurrah for Nelson!"<br />
"Troubridge made a bad bungle of the Goeben business.<br />
"The two cashiered Colonels were in a village on the 
retreat from Mons. The Maire of the village begged them 
not to fight. They saw force coming. They sent out letter 
of surrender. Force proved to be the British Cavalry."

His admiration of the Germans, whenever they put 
up a good fight, is revealed in another note:

"At this time Oct. 23 came the famous advance of the 
Ein-Jahrige, who carried the trenches of the Guards, 
West Surreys, and other famous regiments. It was a great 
exploit."

Sometimes he wrote a series of such memoranda on 
the left of a foolscap sheet and sent it to a commanding 
officer for his comments:

"The British trenches were a mile and a quarter from 
river. The position appeared serious as there was a river 
and the Aisne Canal behind the troops, and no supports 
all the way to Paris.

"Comment: But be careful how you make use of this,
as it was a tactical error, probably avoidable, but
still we must not give away the Generalship.

"Confirms the demoralization of the retreat from Mons. 

It was, if one may say so, a reasoned demoralization, for 
it was essential to get on, and even rifles, etc., had to be 
sacrificed to speed. The morale was all right and the army 
regathered. The British were angry at being placed in so 
exposed a situation. Germans finding the roads littered 
with rifles naturally thought the army destroyed and were 
annoyed when it came again.

"Comment: This is of course only 'hearsay evidence.'"

All of which shows how difficult it is to get at the 
facts while a war is in progress.

Naturally he was hindered by the War Office at 
every turn; and the commander-in-chief, Sir John 
French, hearing that he had communicated privately 
with officers, objected to a book containing information 
so gathered. Doyle wished to dedicate his first volume 
to French, who early in April 1915 expressed his approval, said that he would be only too delighted if it were published at once, but thought it would be advisable that the proofs should be submitted to him. On May 14th Sir Reginald Brade wrote from the War 
Office to say that objection was taken to the third and 
fourth chapters, and that, in the opinion of the General
Staff, they should not be published yet. On May 20th 
Brinsley Fitzgerald, private secretary to Sir John French, 
informed Doyle that the Military Censor considered the 
appearance of the volume undesirable at the moment, 
adding that in any event Sir John "would not wish the 
book if published to be dedicated to him as originally 
proposed." On May 29th Brade returned chapters 4, 6, 
7, 8 and 9, saying that the Headquarters Staff opposed 
their issue just then. And two years later (April 1917) 
Doyle was still being impeded by the authorities, for 
he heard that G.H.Q. "cannot see their way to relax 
the censorship of your account of the Somme battle." 
After the censor's blue pencil had done its worst, the 
work appeared, volume by volume, and Doyle described 
its failure to appeal to the public and critics as "the 
greatest and most undeserved literary disappointment of 
my life." It is, as might be expected, the most readable 
history of the campaign.

His private life during the war years was not very 
private. His wife started a home for Belgian refugees 
in Crowborough; a wing of his house was given over 
to the soldiers for their use and recreation; and once a 
week he entertained about a hundred Canadian officers 
at dinner, though by the way the members of his family 
(not the servants) had to live on three-quarters of their 
rations, the remaining quarter being their contribution 
to the national saving.

In April 1917 Doyle had breakfast alone with the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, and on leaving Downing Street he went straight to the Berkeley Hotel, where he wrote a synopsis of their talk, which I reproduce verbatim. K stands for Kitchener, R for Rasputin:

"L.G.<br />
"K. grew very arrogant (said L.G.). He had flashes of genius but was usually stupid. He could not see any use in munitions. He was against Tanks. He was against Welsh and Irish Divisions. He refused the flags which the ladies worked. He obstructed in all things and ruined the Dardanelles. But he was a great force in Recruiting. Miss Asquith said of him, 'He is not a great man. He is a great Poster.'

"L.G. had a row with him in the Cabinet and said to him, 'Please remember that you are only one of 19.'

"I told L.G. my experience with K. He was shocked.

"L.G. had sent a Welsh painter to do Mametz Wood. Listened with interest to my account of the action. Said it was a beautiful story.

"Was interested to hear how I did the history and said 
it was probably better done from human documents. 
Asked me whether I had picked out any particular man 
among all the generals. I said I had seen no genius but 
that they were all capable. He agreed. Wanted to know 
if I had met Bridges. Seemed to think most of him.

"Got on to armor, and found him very keen. He said he had no doubt about it. Said the soldiers always obstructed. He had sent many devices but they were all shelved. I mentioned Watts of the 7th Division as open to armor. He said 'Yes' and seemed to know all about 
Watts and admire him.

"Spoke about revolution in Russia. Guards had killed their officers. Czar weak. Czarina very like Marie Antoinette. Revolt was not pro-German. Czarina was. She had been much upset over death of R. Only one subaltern was left of the Guards. Byzantine."

Doyle visited the Australians at the front in September 1918 and witnessed the beginning of the battle which finished the war. For us the interesting thing about his trip is the speech he made to some twelve hundred Australians. Standing on a mound in the pouring rain, he praised them for their splendid deeds, but "ventured to remind them that 72 per cent of the men engaged and 76 per cent of the casualties were Englishmen of England." In his opinion there had been "a systematic depreciation of what the glorious English, apart from the British, soldiers did," and he had the pluck to tell a crowd of war-battered colonials, not notable for modesty concerning their own achievements,  to keep a sense of proportion.

There spoke the English man in the street, whose voice would never have been heard but for this Scottish Irishman.


=== 12. The Last Phase ===

The biographer is concerned with this world, not the 
next, so there is no need for me to deal with Doyle's 
conversion to spiritualism except in so far as it was the 
inescapable outcome of his nature; for a man's beliefs 
are important to his biographer only as a revelation of 
himself.

Doyle's nature demanded a religion. The Jesuits had 
disgusted him with their hell-fire nonsense, and he was 
too rational to accept any of the ready-made creeds. 
He therefore began in his Southsea days to look about 
for something that would harmonize with his temperament and appeal to his reason. He took a long time to 
find it, attending innumerable seances, reading hundreds 
of books, investigating all sorts of phenomena, and experiencing those flashes of belief and blackouts of disbelief which are inseparable from such an enquiry. But when a man searches desperately for a faith he is bound to find what he is looking for sooner or later, and what 
he is looking for will be, for him, the Truth. Doyle 
wanted to believe in a future life, and he got what he 
wanted. His methods of examination, the object of his
pursuit, and his resultant apostolate, throw light on his 
personality and must be touched upon here.

As with everything he undertook, from the writing 
of historical novels to the exposure of British justice, 
from the playing of golf to the handling of a rifle, he 
was very thorough, leaving no source of information 
untapped; and when his studies were completed he 
possessed one of the largest private libraries of spiritualist literature in the world. The more picturesque side of the investigations made a direct appeal to his fancy. Haunted houses, sepulchral voices, moving tables, automatic writing, materialization of limbs, levitation of bodies, mysterious sounds, lights, and touches, dead silence and darkness and quivering apprehension; everything was there to stimulate and satisfy his love of the weird.

"Ghosts," said William Blake, "do not appear much 
to imaginative men, but only to common minds, who 
do not see the finer spirits. A ghost is a thing seen by 
the gross bodily eye; a vision, by the mental." This 
remark of Blake's raises an interesting point which 
closely concerns the character of our subject. It is a misuse of terms to describe material phenomena as spiritual. 
The world of matter is the world we know by means 
of our five senses; the spirit-world cannot so be known, 
but is divined by our imagination, by the spirit within 
us. The phenomena observed at seances do not prove 
the existence of a spirit-world, which, if its existence 
could be proved by the five senses, would cease to be 
the world of the spirit: they merely prove that there 
are phenomena in the world of matter; which nobody 
has ever doubted. The true spiritualists are the great 
artists, and we enter the spirit-world through the 
medium of such miracles as Shakespeare's King Lear 
and Beethoven's Last Quartets and Salisbury Cathedral, 
not by the aid of such curiosities as a floating body or
a mist of ectoplasm. Doyle believed in fairies, but did 
not think their presence was proved until someone had 
made a photograph of them; which is rather like believing that Wordsworth wrote his Ode on Immortality, but not feeling certain of it without a snapshot of him doing so.

People do not radically change their natures through life, and Doyle, who thought that he had been converted from materialism to spiritualism, had merely arrived at the inevitable faith of the materialist, the faith of one who can only believe on the evidence of his five senses, namely: that himself, Conan Doyle, the recognizable and conscious entity of this material world, went on for ever after death, presumably enjoying all the things that had made life so delightful at Crowborough. He thought that this faith removed the fear of death; but, as Bernard Shaw once pointed out, "the man who has come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change so called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and utterly careless life, has not overcome the fear of death: on the contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on any terms whatsoever."

The reasons Doyle gave for a future life were as materialistic as his conception of it. "If there is no after life," said he, "why should man strive to improve himself? It is a waste if all his efforts end in annihilation. ... I am sure that the mass of mankind would argue
that if there is only one life, and death ends all, our 
wisest course is to get as much pleasure as we may." And 
again: "The idea of punishment, of purifying chastisement, in fact of Purgatory, is justified by the reports from the other side. Without such punishment there could be no Justice in the Universe, for how impossible it would be to imagine that the fate of a Rasputin is 
the same as that of a Father Damien." This is the old
police-court view of God, a priest-created bogey who 
sits in judgment on his creatures and distributes rewards and penalties. To make people behave themselves by frightening them with what will happen if they don't is a form of morality that comes strangely from a "spiritualist."

Doyle's own notion of a materialist was a person who 
disbelieved in a life beyond the grave. Yet it could 
easily be shown that the most materialistic people are 
those who are so much in love with themselves, their 
power, their pleasure or their comfort in this world that 
they believe devoutly in a continuation of these blessings elsewhere; whereas the spiritual people are those who, having gladly sacrificed the material advantages of this life for its immaterial beauties, are not interested in the persistence of personality and face extinction 
without a qualm. It is usually the earthbound egotist 
who longs to be immortal.

Like all materialists, Doyle felt impelled to make converts to his faith, and having convinced himself of what he wished to be convinced he started a crusade with all the vigor he had previously brought to the 
Congo atrocities, the cases of Edalji and Slater, the reform of divorce, the Olympic Games and tariff reform. Disbelief can be a dogma as much as belief, and the simple man who starts as a sceptic often ends as a fanatic. His friends noticed a curious outward change 
in Doyle. Hitherto they had known him as a burly 
sportsman, practical, prosaic, precise. Now he was either 
vague, with a dreamy far-away look in his eyes, or emphatically direct, with an angry flush in his cheeks. "In a less practical man," Arthur Rose wrote to me, "his belief in spiritualism would have been fanatical. He carried it to extreme lengths, showing impatience with 
anyone who expressed the slightest doubt. Yet fanaticism is the last word I could attach to a man so solid. You would have judged him to have not the slightest spark of the mystic. Yet his eye would light with something like the mystic's when he spoke of the spiritland, 
and his devotion to the Cause was nothing less than a 
crusade, to which he sacrificed money and all other 
interests so far as I know." Another friend, Ernest Short, 
had this to say: "My personal reaction was that the man 
took his spiritual experiences so seriously and was so 
profoundly convinced of their truth that argument or 
even discussion was impossible; one might just as well 
have argued with St. Theresa about her mystical experiences. Though with Doyle there would have been no difficulty at all in discussing lots of other matters. He was not in any sense unapproachable when he was interested." Francis Gribble informed me that Doyle "was 
very sensitive to any suggestion that any medium of his 
acquaintance was a fraudulent practitioner and once 
had a most violent row with Filson Young who exposed 
—or claimed to have exposed—some trickery at a seance 
at which he was present." Sir Philip Gibbs had the same 
sort of experience with Doyle: "Unfortunately he was 
much annoyed with me towards the end because of 
a book I wrote about a fake spiritualist to which he 
objected very strongly." A. E. W. Mason also told me 
of a man who had exposed a medium, much to the 
annoyance of Doyle, who said that he was "not a gentleman." Hugh Kingsmill, sitting next to Doyle at lunch, happened to drop some remark about his theory of survival. "It's not a theory," growled Doyle in a manner that did not encourage further small-talk.

The 1914-18 war produced the new Doyle, who determined to spread the evangel, writing books and lecturing all over the country. He allowed nothing to interfere with his self-appointed duty, and when his son Kingsley was dying he refused to cancel an engagement 
to speak at Nottingham, replying, when urged to do so,
"No, under no circumstances would I break faith with 
the public. They have learned to trust me, and I must 
be worthy of that trust. Besides, Kingsley would wish 
it so." His sense of humor was not always in abeyance. 
At Huddersfield he upset a bottle of water on the table 
in front of him, the reporters below getting the benefit 
of it, and after his speech he passed down a note to 
them: "I may not have converted you, but at any rate 
I have baptised you." He must have been amused, too, 
by a letter he received from a man who was serving a 
life sentence in Sing Sing prison, because he preserved 
it. "I accept without questioning the opinions of two 
such master minds who have delved deep and often," 
wrote the convict, who had been reading the works of 
Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle. "One obstacle in my path is lack of belief in life after death. If the grave ends all there can be no spirits."

There was no hocus-pocus about Doyle, who was an 
absolutely honest man, convinced of the importance, 
the urgency, and the truth of his message. He sacrificed 
everything for it: money, prestige, and eventually his 
life. The most highly paid short-story writer of his time, 
he practically abandoned fiction at the age of sixty, devoted his pen to the furtherance of spiritualism, and began that exhausting platform propaganda which undermined his health and made him so unpopular in certain quarters that it cost him a peerage. Having delivered his message throughout Great Britain, he took his wife and family to Australia in 1920, to America in 1922, to America again in 1923, and to South Africa in 1928, speaking in many of the larger cities of those continents, and, after deducting the traveling and living expenses of his party, handing over the entire balance to the Cause. He wrote accounts of all his journeys, but as they are mostly concerned with the object of his travels we need not follow him. Several touches in his record are worth noting, however, because they reveal the man behind the missionary.

His arrival in Australia united the religious sects and the agnostics for the first time in history, and he was attacked by the clergy and the secularists with passionate unanimity at Melbourne, where he and his wife were invited by the British Empire League to lunch, at which 
the Federal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Joseph Cook, made a speech, and Doyle uttered the truest word ever spoken in jest: "In my reply I pulled the leg of my audience with some success, for I wound up by saying, very solemnly, that I was something greater than 
governments and the master of Cabinet Ministers. By the time I had finished my tremendous claims I am convinced that they expected some extravagant occult pretension, whereas I actually wound up with the words, 'for I am the man in the street.' There was a good deal of amusement caused."

Naturally the crowds were more interested in the yarnspinner than in the spookist, and during the tremendous welcome he received on the station platform at Sydney a digger was heard to ask, "Who's that?" 
and an urchin to reply, "The bloke that wrote Sherlock Holmes." The pressmen wanted to know whether Holmes was irretrievably dead. "Well," said Doyle, "you can say that a coroner has never sat upon him." The storm of abuse at Brisbane did not lower his takings at the theater, where the manager declared the business to be as good as "comic opera in the season."

Doyle got into conversation with the captain of the boat going from New Zealand to Australia and makes this characteristic comment: "He had been torpedoed once, and had lost, on another occasion, nearly all his crew with plague, so that he had much that was interesting to talk about." From which we infer that if the captain had also been tortured by the Chinese, tossed by an elephant, mauled by a tiger, rescued from the cannibals while being roasted, and the sole survivor of a family destroyed by fire, our materialistic spiritualist would have found him absorbing.

In spite of his preoccupation with the macabre, Doyle had much common sense, and he realized that the Australians, by discouraging immigration, were selling future security for present comfort.

While out there he heard of the death of his mother 
at the age of 83. She had joined the Church of England 
and had shown no sympathy with his psychic work. 
His brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, also died, and 
Doyle returned just in time for his funeral at St. Jean 
de Luz.

Every lecturing record was broken by Doyle when 
he toured North America, but it is difficult to say 
whether this was due to the general interest in Sherlock 
Holmes or the next world. True he told his interviewers 
that they would all find themselves in Paradise after 
death, but being pressmen they felt dubious on the 
point. This is the sort of thing to which they subjected him:

"Well now, Mr. Doyle, say! Do they have golf in the next world?"

"No. I have no reason to say that."

"You never heard them speak of golf?"

"No, I never have."

"Well, you said they had amusements."

"Yes, they say they have more than we."

"Well, maybe golf is among them."

"I never heard them say so."

Next morning a newspaper headline ran: "Doyle says 
they play golf in Heaven." At every center he had to 
accustom himself to such headlines as "Do Spooks 
Marry?" and "High Jinks in the Beyond."

It is pleasant to find him still interested in his literary heroes: making a pilgrimage to the Mount Auburn cemetery at Boston in order to place flowers on the grave of "one of my spiritual and literary godfathers, Oliver Wendell Holmes"; visiting the Parkman country again; leaving flowers on the grave at Indianapolis of Whitcomb 
Riley, a poet of his acquaintance who had written prettily  
about children while thoroughly disliking them; and 
looking for the little cottage at Fordham near New York 
where Edgar Allan Poe had spent his last years. "If 
every man," he wrote, "who owed his inspiration to 
Poe was to contribute a tithe of his profits therefrom, he  
would have a monument greater than the pyramids, and 
I for one would be among the builders. But his nature 
was sinister. A nature without humor is always sinister. 
But he had glamor to make amends — even as a youngster 
he had this glamor. Did ever schoolboy write such lines 
as those which speak of 'the glory that was Greece, the 
splendor that was Rome'? They haunt the mind." (They 
haunt it still more when not misquoted.) People could 
not, however, count on Doyle's sustained interest in literature even when linked with spiritualism: "I slept in the Vancouver boat that night, and was awakened by someone who had a clairaudient message for me from Charles Dickens. I wish I could suffer fools more gladly — but I apologized next morning."

Doyle had always liked the Americans and their country, but several things did not meet with his approval. Pittsburgh inspired him with the reflection: "Personally I  am of opinion that God sent a man into this world that he might improve in mind and in spirit, and not that he 
should make screws and rivets." The Chicago jail horrified him; there was no light or air in the building, which was loathsome. "The architect who designed this ought to be in it!" he exclaimed. The treatment of the prisoners was medieval, and he came away "sunk in deep melancholy" to write an article about it. From Los Angeles
they visited Catalina Island, owned by Mr. Wrigley, the 
chewing gum king. "Venus would look vulgar if she 
chewed," thought Doyle, "and Shakespeare a lout. There 
was never so hopelessly undignified a custom. A man 
may drink and look a king among men, he may smoke 
and look a fine fellow and a sportsman, but the man, or, 
worse still, the woman, who chews becomes all animal 
at once." (To be exact, all cow at once.) Their view of 
the Pacific Ocean on the way to the Mexican border 
was largely obscured by advertisements of Hot Dog and 
Frankfurter Sausage, while such queries as "Why not a 
Kelly Car?" shut off the horizon. "It is really shameful,"  
felt Doyle, "that a few should for their personal gain 
ruin the aesthetic and artistic pleasure of the whole nation." Yet, in spite of chewing gum, advertisements, prisons, the press-gang, screws and rivets, in spite of the persecution to which mediums were subjected and the rampant materialism on every hand, Doyle hoped for and prophesied the eventual union of the English speaking countries — the United States of Africa, America, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales — each state retaining its own complete self-government, the predominant partner being the U.S.A.

His South African tour is mainly interesting because 
of the fighting spirit which still animated him at the age  
of seventy. His son Adrian told me that he was dissuaded 
with difficulty from physical combat with a man who suggested that he was using his eldest son's death as publicity for spiritualism. At Bloemfontein he was shown round by a Dutch journalist. Seeing the monument commemorating the 26,000 women and children who had 
died in Concentration Camps during the Boer War, he 
read the inscription, which appeared to place the blame 
upon the British. Such an assertion, he exclaimed, was 
disgraceful: the Concentration Camps were an act of
clemency whereby the British fought the husbands and 
fed the wives. His protest was reported, and he was thoroughly abused by the Dutch press, one paper stating that 
he had gone out of his way to attack the monument as 
if the women and children had no right to one. He 
promptly called on the editor, who explained that he had 
misunderstood the inscription, which was in Afrikaans, 
not Dutch. Then why had not the journalist apprised 
him of his error? he asked. That afternoon, before his 
explanatory letter could appear in the press, some hundreds of young men assembled outside his hotel with threats of violence. But he and his family were out on a motor trip, and when they returned the crowd had been dispersed by the police. They were advised to leave next day from the first station down the line; but Doyle flatly 
refused; and they were unmolested. Nothing seemed to 
frighten him, from armed gangsters to horned mammals, 
and I heard from Adrian Doyle that on their way back through East Africa his father suggested that the two brothers should take the flanks, himself the centre, when a rhinoceros was being driven towards them. It would naturally make straight for him; he would suddenly open his umbrella; and while it paused in surprise the boys could shoot at it. The beast did not take advantage of the arrangement, which Doyle seemed to think a perfectly reasonable one.

Not content with writing and speaking for his beliefs, Doyle did his best to make converts privately. The following quotations from letters I have received prove his proselytizing zeal:

"I knew Conan Doyle, but not intimately. I admired 
and respected him greatly, but I could not believe as he 
did in the manifestations of spiritualism, and he knew it. 
I believe that all the manifestations are produced by the  
subconscious minds of the mediums, perhaps in connection with the subconscious minds of the sitters. One day 
when I was staying in the Grosvenor Hotel, London, I 
encountered Conan Doyle in the lift. I had recently published a novel called Mrs. Maiden, in which I had shown 
my disbelief in the manifestations of mediums being 
produced by visitations of the dead from the other 
world. Conan Doyle said to me, 'My dear Hichens, you 
are on the side of the Philistines against the children of 
light.' He then asked me to come to a lecture he was 
giving on the following Sunday. I went, heard an interesting and obviously sincere lecture, but was not converted. I believe Conan Doyle, in spite of his great talent and cleverness, was in error. But he was absolutely sincere. An admirable man and a fascinating writer." (Roben Hichens.)

"Doyle was very sympathetic when I suffered a bereavement and gave me the name of a medium who startled me for the first time in connection with spiritualism. After two equally amazing further sittings with this medium, Doyle asked me what had happened, and, when I told him, immediately said that those results were not 
given me for my private consumption. He meant that I 
should make the matter public in either an article or lecture. The result was that he arranged for me to speak at 
the Aeolian Hall, which I did with the medium on the 
platform. It was my sole appearance in that part because, 
as a result of it, I was invited to attend seances which 
discouraged me by their futility and fatuity, not to mention their probable fake. I am not apt to scoff at occult things like seances. On the contrary, I am sure there are genuine phenomena worthy of scientific investigation." (Arthur Rose.)

"In 1927, when my son was killed in a motoring accident, Doyle wrote to me urging that I should seek mitigation of my sorrow by recourse to the spiritualistic communications in which he so stoutly believed. That he should have troubled to do so I regard as an evidence 
of the man's warm kindliness." (Rafael Sabatini.)

"He did his best to make a convert of me. I assisted at 
more than one seance and was challenged by my host to 
do anything I pleased to exclude fraud. None the less, 
what I saw and heard failed to convince me that communication between the quick and the dead had been established. Quite genially, he told me that I was too impatient, too eager for results; and he added, modestly enough, that patience had never failed him. I believe him to have been an absolutely honest man, incapable of countenancing any form of trickery." (Horace Annesley Vachell.)

Doyle also started a Psychic Bookshop, where he was 
often to be seen supplying the curious with information 
about the exhibits. His arms struck at least one observer 
as being too small for his massive frame, and it was 
strange to watch him gesticulating his way round the 
room, talking in that rather muffled voice of his, and 
brushing aside every query, so sure of the truth himself 
that he would not argue whether a certain photo proved 
what he said it did: its bare existence was proof enough.

He was attacked from all sides: by Catholics, Protestants, Rationalists, and Scientists; by Freethinkers, Slavethinkers, and Nonthinkers; all of whom went for him with as wide a vocabulary of abuse as they could muster; but he usually gave something better than he got. One 
Roman Catholic convert, Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote 
to say that he was "a disgusting beast," who ought to be 
horsewhipped for his "filthy caricatures" of Jesus Christ, 
and to prophesy that his "blasphemous ravings" would 
bring a "dreadful judgment" on him. He replied: "Sir, I 
was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval 
which could in any way annoy me." A laconic letter-writer, he would often reply to a request for something with a simple, "Yes. A.C.D." or "No. A.C.D." Once he sent a note to P. G. Wodehouse, who forgot to answer it and in a few days received this reminder on a post 
card: "? A.C.D."

Doyle's home life was exceptionally happy. He and 
his wife were lovers to the end. "After twenty-three 
years of married life," she wrote, "whenever I heard my 
husband's dear voice in the distance, or he came into the 
room, a something radiant seemed to enter and permeate 
the atmosphere." He bought her a picturesque old cottage in the New Forest called Bignell Wood, and to this he would occasionally retreat in his later years for peace and quiet. At Crowborough too it was sometimes necessary to get away from visitors as well as the children, 
and there was a wooden but in the garden where he and 
his wife would have tea together, where he could work 
or meditate, and close to which they now lie buried. To 
the children of his second marriage he was more of a 
friend than a father. In their earlier days he used to tell 
them stories of animals, Red Indians, cricketers, pirates, 
and above all prize-fighters, of whom he would say, "I 
don't mind telling you, my dears, that there have been 
times when it was not the words of good and pious men, 
but it was the memory and example of those old rascals, 
that have helped me over a rough patch of the road." 
Adrian Doyle can only recall one occasion when his 
father did more than administer a reproof. At the age of 
sixteen he happened to speak of a certain woman as ugly, 
upon which his father boxed his ears and said, "No 
woman is ugly. Every woman is beautiful. But some are 
more beautiful than others." The sex, however, had less 
attractive qualities, and when Adrian was a little older 
Sir Arthur advised him, if ever he had much to do with 
women, not to forget that his father was also a doctor.

Outside his home Doyle also aroused affection. Apart 
from his love of sport, his genuine patriotism, and all the
other emotions which he shared with the average man, 
he was very kind-hearted. He could probably have lived 
in comfort on the money he gave away, and he could 
certainly have earned a large income in the time he spent 
on other people's affairs. His generosity manifested itself 
in all sorts of queer ways. Returning from a game of golf 
one day, he met a tramp, who displayed the holes in his 
footwear. Removing his own brand new shoes, Doyle 
said, "We take about the same size. Have these." Another reason why people liked him so much was that he never spoke maliciously of anyone. "During our long talks," H. A. Vachell informed me, "I never heard him say anything unkind about others." He even criticized 
his idol Macaulay for writing so ruthlessly of Montgomery: "One would have wished to think that Macaulay's heart was too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter an attack... One would think more highly of the man if he had not done that savage bit of work."

In conversation Doyle was much more English than 
Irish. In the endless quarrels between the two nations he 
always took the English side, and he had both the bluntness and the reserve of the Englishman. In an unpublished article on Truth being stranger than Fiction he wrote: "The most remarkable experiences in a man's life are those in which he feels most, and they are precisely 
the ones upon which he is least disposed to talk. All the 
really very serious things in my life, the things which 
have been stamped deep into me and left their impress 
for ever, are things which I could never bring myself to 
speak of." He made up for this reserve concerning himself by passing on a great deal of information on other matters. He was always studying something — history, languages, archaeology, chemistry, astronomy, geology, zoology, and so forth — and as he had a good memory he was able to tell people, and enjoyed telling them; what 
they wanted to know about most things. In fact he could
have been what he so much admired: a first-rate professor. On the other hand he was often too much absorbed in his thoughts to display the quickness of mind and observation expected of him. Two instances have been given me. "I used to wear black Ascot stocks instead of collar and tie in those days," wrote Arthur Rose, "and I remember Doyle saying one day as he looked at me, 'There's something sinister about you today.' I recall my surprise that the author of Sherlock Holmes should not have known at once that he got that impression from the blackness of my neckwear. Any such impression was absent when my stock was of shantung, as it frequently was." This Watsonish aspect came out even more definitely in a duologue with Hugh Kings- 
mill:

"Arnold Lunn is a son of Sir Henry Lunn, is he not?" asked Doyle.<br />
"Yes."<br />
"And you are a brother of Arnold Lunn?"<br />
"Yes."<br />
(After a minute's pause for reflection) "Then you also are a son of Sir Henry Lunn?"<br />
"Yes."

Doyle's personal popularity suffered when he embraced spiritualism. His old friends became rather nervous of him, and many of them he seldom met, their places being taken by fellow-spiritualists. But he passed a day or two in the last year of his life with one of the  
oldest, Sir James Barrie, who used to take a large house 
near Cheltenham in order to entertain during the summer 
months. In discussing Barrie's success as a dramatist 
Doyle had once said to Lynn Harding: "Yes, Barrie is 
a rich man, but I think I am the happier." Any doubts 
he had entertained on the point must have been dispelled 
when he found that his host's main occupation was the
flicking of moistened stamps, by means of a coin, on to 
the library ceiling of Stanway Court. The members of 
the houseparty were a little apprehensive, on Barrie's 
account, that Doyle would raise the subject of spiritualism. He did; but the stamp-flicker bore it like a man, and the evening passed off without a major crisis. From the notes Doyle made in his bedroom that night, the conversation at dinner does not appear to have been scintillating; but the fact that he thought it worth recording has some 
bearing on his nature, so I print the account exactly as he wrote it. The "Douglas" referred to was James Douglas, editor of The Sunday Express:

"Sir James Barrie's. Aug. 23-24/29. <br />
"Present. J.M.B. Mr. Asquith. Lady Cynthia Asquith. 
Two sons, one at Winchester. Younger one Simon. Mrs. 
Davis, wife of Gunnery Lieut. in Navy, one boy. Mr. 
& Mrs. Denis MacKail. Mrs. Thomas Hardy. Lady Lewis 
(widow of Sir George).

Barrie said:

"Shaw gets up every morning and cries out, 'Hurrah! I am Shaw.'<br />
"Shaw's plays were about Town Councillors and Sanitation.<br />
"Douglas — 'The man who writes articles about "if I were God.' "<br />
"He (i.e., Barrie) had one psychic experience when 
some one kept pulling his arm back into bed. He rushed 
out of the room.<br />
"He said he was out of touch and sympathy with the 
present generation of writers. They were too sexual. At 
the same time we had to stand aside and let us see what 
the youngsters could do. It was a pity women took the 
same line. He thought well of Lawrence, of a new man 
called Powys, and of Lacon Watson.<br />
"Someone said that if Bacon did not write Shakespeare's 
plays, then he missed the chance of his life.

Doyle's last work of fiction was The Maracot Deep (1929), in which Professor Maracot discovers the descendants of an ancient civilization living on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and Professor Challenger discovers that the earth is sensitive by boring into its entrails. In 
describing the conditions of life in Atlantis just before 
the deluge, the author gives us a picture of England in 
the nineteen-twenties: "There was no longer the quiet 
and simple family life, nor the cultivation of the mind, 
but we had a glimpse of a people who were restless and 
shallow, rushing from one pursuit to another, grasping 
ever at pleasure, forever missing it, and yet imagining 
always that in some more complex and unnatural form it 
might still be found. There had arisen on the one hand 
an over-rich class who sought only sensual gratification, 
and on the other hand an over-poor residue whose whole 
function in life was to minister to the wants of their 
masters, however evil those wants might be." Doyle's 
fears for England's future had already been expressed in 
"The Last Galley," one of a series of episodes concerning which he wrote that "if all my work were to be destroyed save only that one single section which I might elect to preserve, my choice would certainly be those historical pictures which come under the heading 
of Tales of Long Ago." Each tale lifts the curtain on a 
moment in bygone history, and he was trying to do what 
Kipling had attempted in the Puck books; but neither 
Doyle nor Kipling made the past vivid because they were 
more anxious to teach history than to tell a story, to impart facts than to let their fancies rip. A. E. W. Mason showed how that kind of thing could be done convincingly in Three Gentlemen.

When he wrote the sentence quoted above Doyle was probably thinking solely of his short stories, because he always spoke of his long romances as his best work and manifested keen satisfaction whenever they were mentioned. George Moore's high opinion of them, and Moore seldom praised any novels except his own, gave 
him great pleasure; and he was delighted when Hesketh 
Prichard wrote to him in March 1916: "If it is of any 
interest to you I read White Company and Nigel when 
I was utterly fed up with all other books, having had 24 
days in bed." Prichard was ill with jaundice when he 
pencilled this note, after a long period spent in training 
"snipers," during which he had "walked down more 
front line trench than anyone in B.E.F." A compliment 
by another author brought a look of gratitude to Doyle's 
face. At a lunch of the Dramatists Club shortly after the 
1914-18 war Edgar Wallace remarked that people only 
thought of Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but 
he was something more than that: he was the author of 
The White Company. After lunch Doyle took Wallace 
aside and had a long talk with him. One more incident in 
this connection. In 1929 the four long stories of Sherlock 
Holmes were issued in a single volume, and I reviewed 
them enthusiastically in G. K.'s Weekly, receiving a letter from Doyle which began: "I must really send you a word of thanks for your kindly article upon Holmes." But he went on to say that he sometimes hated Holmes and wished he had never created him, because his popularity had prevented a proper appreciation of Sir Nigel and the rest. A man gets a label, he complained, instancing Sullivan, whose popular work with Gilbert had hurt his reputation as a serious musician. Doyle added that Poe had influenced him, that Gaboriau had not, but that 
more than anyone else Joseph Bell had been responsible for Sherlock Holmes, in spite of whom, he admitted at the close of his letter, "I have much to be thankful for and your kind article is the last example of it."

Before leaving the subject we may concede that the 
pure action scenes in Rodney Stone, The Refugees, The
White Company and Sir Nigel, are among the best in 
the language. Though he lacked the imagination of Sir 
Walter Scott, the charm of Stanley Weyman, the naturalism of Charles Reade, and the brilliance of Crosbie Garstin, no writer in English can capture and communicate the simple joy of physical energy and combat so infectiously as Doyle. Only Dumas can beat him at that game. But for one reader in the future who will turn to 
any of the four historical romances, a hundred will revel 
in the Holmes and Gerard sagas, which have a quality, 
at once amusing and exciting, peculiar to Doyle, and in 
which alone he has no rival.

Having delved into the past and probed into the future, having dived to the bottom of the sea and drilled into the bowels of the earth, there was nothing left for Doyle to write about, H. G. Wells having despoiled him of the other planets; so he bade farewell to fiction. But indeed the end was near. In October 1929 he set forth on his final lecturing tour, visiting The Hague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo, and intending to visit every capital in Europe, even Rome, Athens, and Constantinople. But while at Copenhagen he awoke one night 
with a terrible pain in the chest; and although he was 
able to carry out his Scandinavian engagements, he did 
so with grave danger to himself, almost fainting with 
pain in the intervals between the meetings. He returned 
from Oslo a wreck, being carried ashore at Dover by 
two sailors and taken in a bath-chair from Victoria Station to his flat nearby. A specialist diagnosed angina pectoris, the result of over-strain, and ordered a complete rest. Doyle said that the following day, Armistice Sunday, he had promised to speak at the Albert Hall in the 
morning and at the Queen's Hall in the evening. "Then 
you do so at the risk of your life, and I wash my hands 
of the consequence," said the specialist. He took the risk, 
suffering from a violent attack in the cab on his way to
the Albert Hall and receiving treatment in the waiting-room before he could appear. Somehow he survived his speeches at both meetings, though the effort was fatal. Henceforth the least exertion was forbidden, and he lived on the ground-floor at Windlesham.

In March 1930 he resigned from the Society for 
Psychical Research, having been a member for a period 
which he described as "thirty-six years of patience," 
because it adopted a sceptical attitude towards certain 
seances in Millesimo Castle at which the medium was an 
Italian marquis. He censured the editor of the Society's 
journal for implying "that an Italian nobleman, a member of the legislative body, had invited a circle of friends to his home to practice a succession of complicated frauds on them." Doyle's worldliness and innocence are revealed in the sentence. Like the ordinary man, he was impressed by titles; and he never tumbled to the fact 
that the business of every legislative body in history has 
been to practice a succession of complicated frauds on the community.

Sir James Barrie heard of his condition and wrote early in April: "I feel sad to think of you not being able to let yourself go as in the brave days of old, a phrase I could never recall without seeing you, as one may say, in the middle of it." Barrie had been unable to follow 
him in his mission but had always admired his zeal and integrity: "Candidly I cannot think of anyone for whom I have had more respect or who had a more gallant way with him of rushing to the help of the deserving who needed a leader."

Once more he rushed to the help of the deserving. 
Owing to a law passed in the time of James I, mediums 
and those sitting with them could be punished with imprisonment; also spiritualist societies were not recognized by the law and could not benefit from legacies. On July 1st Doyle accompanied a deputation to the Home Secretary, Mr. J. R. Clynes, and made a speech urging the 
repeal of this antiquated statute and demanding legal 
protection for mediums. The strain was too much for 
him and he got back to Windlesham with difficulty. A 
day or two later a friend called to see him. "I am quite 
serene and happy," said he, "quite prepared to go or stay; 
for I know that life and love go on for ever." His wife 
was sitting behind him stroking his brow, and at one 
moment he turned to her and said, "Jean, you are so good 
to me." Pain kept him in his chair, and towards the end 
he could only signify his needs by moving his eyes. And 
so he died. But as, for him, death was merely the beginning of a new and wonderful adventure, let us say that he traveled on, starting the journey on July 7th, 1930, at half-past nine in the morning.

Eighteen years earlier he had written his own epitaph without intending it as such:

I have wrought my simple plan<br />
If I give one hour of joy<br />
To the boy who's half a man,<br />
Or the man who's half a boy.






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